The Tech QuizIIT Kanpur Quiz Club

Quizmaster: Anshul Roy

Instructions• 1 Infinite Bounce. 3 Short connects. 1 Written round. 1 Long connect.

• The answer to none of the questions in this quiz is 42. A team answering 42 to any question would be sent to the Gulag.

• Hints on special request (valid only if the QM is in a good mood).

• The more you stare at the question, the more the answer stares back at you.

• Kindly refrain from cybernetic investigations.

• While preparing the quiz, Wikipedia has been assumed to be correct.

• Quizmaster is Ozymandias, the King of Kings. His decisions are final and binding.

Memri TV memes serve as safety slides in this quiz, keep an eye out for some easy chuckles.

इनिफिनट बाउंस

Rules of the round• 31 questions.

• +20/-10 on a pounce.

• +10/-0 on a bounce.

• On pounces I need the exact answer. No funda.

Q - 1“Arimaa" is a two-player strategy board game that was designed to be playable with a standard chess set (image on next slide). Arimaa was invented in 2003 by Omar Syed, an Indian-American computer engineer. He was inspired by a particular incident to design a new game which could be played with a standard chess set, would be difficult for computers to play well, but would have rules simple enough for his then four-year-old son Aamir to understand. The name "Arimaa" is "Aamir" spelled backwards plus an initial "a”.

What incident inspired the invention of this game?

AnswerDeep Blue defeating Garry Kasparov

Q - 2Jonathan Badeen, the Chief Strategy Officer of X likes to take the credit for “inventing the Y”, when in reality he ripped it off from the flash-card app he worked on for the education company Chegg.

According to him, the idea for Y came to him when - “I was getting out of the shower one morning, wiping the mirror because the room was steamy, and I saw myself staring back at myself. Then I wiped the other direction. All of a sudden it clicked. I started thinking about the way I organize photos in real life. How I’ll start out with one stack and eventually end up with two: my yes and my no. Y would give you that same personal, sort of manipulable experience. It mimics the real world, where you’re able to pick something up and put it over there.”

Id X and Y.

AnswerX = Tinder, Y = Swipe feature

Q - 3“In the year 2633, the evil Red Falcon Organization have set a base on the Galuga archipelago near New Zealand in a plot to conquer the world. Two commandos, Bill Rizer and Lance Bean of the X unit (an elite group of soldiers specializing in guerrilla warfare), are sent to the island to destroy the enemy forces and uncover the true nature of the alien entity controlling them.”

This is the main plot of a famous videogame. Although, when this game was released in the North American market, certain details of the background story were altered. The year of the setting was changed from 2633 to 1987, and the location was moved from the Galuga Islands to the Amazon Rainforest. Bill and Lance were also given the codenames of Mad Dog and Scorpion.

The title of this videogame refers to the Xs, a group of CIA-backed Nicaraguan rebels who were frequently in the news in the USA in that period.

Which videogame am I talking about?

AnswerContra

Q - 4The person in this image (next slide) is Quentin Stafford-Fraser. He is currently a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge's Computer Lab. 

In the year 1991, he wrote a computer program called “XCoffee” (image on next slide). This was done in order to monitor the Trojan Room coffee pot, which was a coffee machine located next to the so-called Trojan Room, in the Computer Lab of the University of Cambridge. 

XCoffee was created to save people working in the building the disappointment of finding the coffee machine empty after making the trip to the Trojan Room.

What common technology did Quentin Stafford-Fraser thus invent?

AnswerWebcam

Q - 5“Project Valerie” is the codename for the world’s first automated triple display laptop. It is constructed to be incredibly powerful yet mobile, and gives users easy access to three eye-popping 4K displays. This laptop was unveiled at CES 2017 in Las Vegas.

Which company has announced this triple display laptop recently?

AnswerRazer

Q - 6In 1994, engineers at Apple code-named the “Power Macintosh 7100” as “X” after the famous ___________. The motive behind the codename was a riff on X's catchphrase "billions and billions", the implication being that the Power Macintosh 7100 would go on to make Apple "billions and billions” of dollars. Apple used the name only internally, but X was concerned that it would become a product endorsement and sent Apple a cease-and-desist letter. Apple complied, but its engineers retaliated by changing the internal codename to "BHA" for "Butt-Head ___________”.

X then sued Apple for defamation in federal court. In November 1995, Apple and X reached an out-of-court settlement and Apple released a conciliatory statement that - "Apple has always had great respect for X. It was never Apple's intention to cause X or his family any embarrassment or concern”. 

Apple's third and final code name for the project was "LaW", short for "Lawyers are Wimps”.

Id X.

AnswerX = Carl Sagan

Q - 7XKCD comic parodying what?

AnswerThe Most Interesting Man in the World

Q - 8In the year 1996, when the company X was rebranded and split from AT&T, it's new logo was widely criticised.

X's logo, also called the "Innovation ring" was designed by Landor Associates, a prominent San Francisco-based branding consultancy. One source inside X said that the logo is actually a Zen Buddhist symbol for "eternal truth". Another source said it represents the mythic Ouroboros, a snake holding its tail in its mouth. X's logo also has been said to represent constant re-creating and re-thinking.

X's logo was compared in the media to the ring a coffee mug leaves on paper. This Dilbert comic strip is parodying this particular speculation (image on next slide).

Id X.

AnswerX = Lucent Technologies

Q - 9In November 2015, James Andrew Bates, was charged with first-degree murder after police found victim Victor Collins strangled and drowned in Bates’ hot tub.

In December 2016, police in Bentonville, Arkansas issued a warrant to X, asking the company to hand over data from Bates’ Y device to help prosecute him.

Police records said that the Y, which Bates owned could have controlled the music streaming, which was being wirelessly transmitted throughout the night using Y’s assistant Z. During the course of their investigation, police requested X to handover data in the form of audio recordings, transcribed records, and other text records from Bates’ Y.

According to X, Y is always listening through a system of seven built-in microphones but waits for a person to say the “wake word”, Z, to send it commands. Y also records and streams audio to the cloud.

Id X, Y and Z.

AnswerX = Amazon, Y = Echo, Z = Alexa

Q - 10X Interactive is an American computer software and social media company. The company was founded by Darrell and Cliff Lerner in 2005. The company went public in 2006. X Interactive owns and operates FirstMet.com, an online dating website. The company also owns The Grade, a mobile dating application.

On 6th February, 2017, the stock prices of X Interactive rose suddenly from $4.5 to $15 (image on next slide). The reason for such a sudden increase in the stock prices was because investors confused X Interactive with another famous publicly traded company, as they both have the same name X.

Id X.

AnswerX = Snap

Q - 11This photo (next slide) is titled “Jennifer in Paradise” and it was snapped by John Knoll in 1987 on a secluded beach in the Bora Bora island. The subject of this photo is John Knoll’s then girlfriend Jennifer. At that time, the young couple worked together at Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasfilm's special-effects company, and were enjoying a well-earned holiday after working on the film “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”.

In the world of technology, what is the significance of this particular photo?

AnswerFirst Photoshopped image

(John Knoll and his brother Thomas Knoll created Photoshop. “Jennifer in Paradise” became the first image used to demonstrate the software.)

Q - 12The company X was founded in the year 1999 by Alexander Asseily and Hosain Rahman, two Stanford University students. X was initially called AliphCom, this name was derived from “Aleph/Alif", the first letter of Semitic writing systems.

In 2002, AliphCom won a contract with DARPA, the U.S. military’s research arm, to research ways for combat soldiers to communicate with each other in difficult conditions. AliphCom began to develop a mobile phone headset designed to suppress background noise.

In 2011, AliphCom changed it’s name to X, after it’s most popular product, the “X Era”.

Id X.

AnswerX = Jawbone

Q - 13On 1st February 2017, Japan launched a nationwide “Green Initiative”. Japanese citizens were requested to donate their discarded or obsolete electronic devices like mobile phones, laptops, cameras etc. Around 2000 collection bins will be placed at offices and NTT Docomo stores all over Japan by April 2017.

It is estimated that nearly 8 tons of metal can be collected from these electronic devices. The aim is that the metal collected from these devices will be used in the production of something.

What?

AnswerMedals for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics

Q - 14In 2015, Leon Gatys, Alexander Ecker and Matthias Bethge presented a research paper titled "A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style” at the premier machine learning conference: Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS).

In 2016, Justin Johnson, Alexandre Alahi and Li Fei-Fei, three researchers working at Stanford University published a research paper titled - "Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution”.

These two research papers are believed to be the technology used behind X. 

Id X.

AnswerX = Prisma

Q - 15Although more famous for his endeavours in some other field, X has also been associated with the world of technology.

In 2011, X was appointed as the Director of Creative Innovation by Intel. X’s role at Intel includes conceptualising the next frontier of interactive technology by acting as an idea generator.

In 2012, X launched an iPhone case (image on next slide) with the motive to "turn your smartphone into a genius-phone”. X claimed that the case would turn the iPhone's humble 8-megapixel camera into a 14-megapixel beast.

In 2014, X started his own wearable technology company Y and also launched a smartwatch called “PULS” (image on next slide).

Id X.

AnswerX = will.i.am

Q - 16The person in this picture (next slide) is Morton Heilig, a cinematographer and a filmmaker who made documentary and 3-D films in the 1950s.

In the year 1957, Morton Heilig wanted to create “cinema of the future”. He applied his cinematographer experience and developed the “Sensorama”, a big and bulky arcade videogame (image on next slide). He patented the device in 1962.

Sensorama gave the player the experience of riding a motorcycle on the streets of Brooklyn. The player felt the wind on their face, the vibration of the motorcycle seat, a 3-D view, and even smells of the city.

Sensorama was quite impressive for 1960s technology. However, it was a commercial failure. The problem was not that Sensorama addressed the wrong senses, but the reason was that the business community just couldn't figure out how to sell it. What title has Morton Heilig been accorded with?

AnswerFather of Virtual Reality

Q - 17In 2016, Panasonic announced that it had reached an agreement with X and would be investing $1.6 billion in X’s new factory (image on next slide), which has been estimated to cost a total of $5 billion. The factory is located at the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, in Nevada.

X held a grand opening on July 29, 2016 of the operational facility. The final factory is expected to be completed by 2020. The factory has been designed to optimize quality while minimizing cost of production and raw material utilization through vertical integration.

Id X.

AnswerX = Tesla

Q - 18X was invented by Fujio Masuoka while working for Toshiba in the year 1980. According to Toshiba, the name X was suggested by Masuoka's colleague, Shōji Ariizumi, because the erasure process of the X contents reminded him of a certain characteristic feature of a camera.

Fujio Masuoka and his colleagues presented the invention at the IEEE 1984 International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) held in San Francisco.

Id X.

AnswerX = Flash Memory

Q - 19This country’s top-level domain was assigned to this country shortly before this country ceased to exist. The country was to be assigned a four letter domain, but was instead assigned a two letter domain.

After it formally ceased to exist, for two years this country did not have a top-level domain, following which it was assigned a new top-level domain which is now in use.

The old domain is however still in use, with the new government and users requesting the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) to not deregister it. In 2001, the ICANN started accepting domain registrations with this top-level domain once again.

Id the country and it’s top-level domain.

AnswerUSSR and .su

Q - 20In January 2017, X announced it’s first digital assistant named MIKA (Multi-purpose Intuitive Knowledge Assistant).

According to X, MIKA will improve telecom operators efficiency by providing engineers faster access to critical information. It is powered by the X AVA knowledge library, a repository of best networking practices gathered from X projects around the world. Using the knowledge library, MIKA can provide recommendations based on similar issues seen in other networks.

MIKA is the first digital assistant trained specifically for the telecom industry, designed to provide automated assistance that saves time and frees highly skilled workers to focus on critical tasks.

Id X.

AnswerX = Nokia

Q - 21Id the guitarist. Why does he feature in a Tech quiz?

AnswerDjango Reinhardt

The Python-based web framework “Django” is named after him

Q - 22This is an emoticon which people use all across Europe. It became popular in 2013. This emoticon is based on a gesture which has been given various names like - “X Rhombus”, “X Diamond” and “Triangle of Power”.

Who is the inspiration behind this emoticon?

AnswerAngela Merkel

Q - 23X is a brand of canned pre-cooked meat made by Hormel Foods Corporation. X’s basic ingredients are pork meat, ham meat, salt, water, potato starch, sugar and sodium nitrite. It was first introduced in 1937 and gained popularity worldwide after its use during World War II. Countries ravaged by the conflict and faced with strict food rations came to extensively consume X.

X was quite popular in England, and in 1970, it even featured in a Monty Python sketch called “X”. In this sketch, two customers in a cafe try to order breakfast from a menu that includes X in almost every dish.

The term X, in the technological context has been adopted from this particular Monty Python sketch, because in this sketch X is shown to be ubiquitous, unavoidable and repetitive.

Id X.

AnswerX = Spam

Q - 24In 2009, Nortel Networks went bankrupt and auctioned-off a portfolio of over 6,000 patents at an auction in 2011. Google bid for these, but was outbid by the “X Consortium”, which submitted the winning bid of $4.5 billion.

Apple, Blackberry, Ericsson, Microsoft and Sony were part of the “X Consortium”, which has been accused of being one of the most fearsome patent trolls in the tech industry.

Id X.

AnswerX = Rockstar Consortium

Q - 25The lady in this picture is X (next slide), an American novelist, dancer, and socialite. X was the wife of the famous author F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In 1986, while working on a project, Y did something to pay tribute to X as he thought that her name sounded "pleasant and significant”.

How did Y immortalise X in the world of tech?

AnswerShigeru Miyamoto named the queen “Zelda” after Zelda Fitzgerald in the video game “The Legend of Zelda”

Q - 26While Napster hurt the sales of many artists the most notable ones to take legal action were Dr. Dre and Metallica. But it actually helped the album sales of one particular band, when an album released by this band leaked on Napster, 3 months before it’s official release and received over millions of downloads.

In October 2000, this album captured the number one spot in the US Billboard 200 sales chart in it’s debut week. It also became the band’s first US top 20 album.

Name the band and the album.

AnswerKid A by Radiohead

Q - 27In December 2016, X partnered with KFC to open a new “smart restaurant” in Beijing (image on next slide). This restaurant employs image recognition hardware which scans customer faces, seeking to infer moods, and guess other information including gender and age of the customer in order to inform their food recommendation.

The facial recognition tech is unique to this one location, though X has also previously worked with KFC on another type of smart restaurant in Shanghai, where a robot customer service agent can listen for and recognize orders made by customers using natural language input.

Id X.

AnswerX = Baidu

Q - 28The “Open Compute Project” is an organisation (image on next slide) that shares designs of data center products among various companies. It's mission is to design and enable the delivery of the most efficient server, storage and data center hardware designs for scalable computing.

This initiative was announced in 2011 by Jonathan Heiliger, the VP of Infrastructure & Technical Operations at X. This effort came out as a result when X started a project to design the world’s most energy efficient data center, one that could handle unprecedented scale at the lowest possible cost in Prineville, Oregon.

X shared its designs with the public and along with Intel, Rackspace, Goldman Sachs and Andy Bechtolsheim, launched the Open Compute Project.

Id X.

AnswerX = Facebook

Q - 29The X effect is a term referring to the unintended consequences of a company’s pre-announcement made either unaware of the risks involved or when the timing is misjudged, which ends up having a negative impact on the sales of the current product. This is often the case when a product is announced too long before it’s actual availability. This has the immediate effect of customers canceling or deferring orders for the current product, knowing that it will soon be obsolete.

The name comes from the planned replacement of the X 1, an early personal computer sold by the X Computer Corporation in 1981. In 1983, founder Adam X pre-announced several next-generation computer models, which had not yet been built, highlighting the fact that they would outperform the existing model. Due to this, sales of the X 1 fell sharply as customers anticipated more advanced computers.

Id X.

AnswerX = Osborne

Q - 30This is the LinkedIn profile of Ross Ulbricht (image on next slide). Ross Ulbricht graduated from University of Texas, Dallas with a degree in Physics and then went on to do a master’s degree in Materials Science from Penn State University.

At Penn State University he started exploring psychedelics and reading Eastern philosophy, and talked openly about switching fields. He was disenchanted with science and became interested in libertarian economics and entrepreneurship.

In 2009, Ross Ulbricht started Good Wagon Books, a business that collected used books and sold them in digital storefronts like Amazon. However, this business failed.

In 2011, Ross Ulbricht launched a famous e-commerce website which eventually shut down in 2013. Which?

AnswerSilk Road

Q - 31In March 2017, X launched a range of perfumes called “Threat de Toilette”, featuring a number of scents, including - “Social Enginoir", “Mal-wear", “Ransom”, and “Phish”.

In a press release, X said that - “Fear awakens our senses. The men and women who wear Threat de Toilette understand today's online threats and protect themselves against them. Fear is no longer felt only in the physical world – it's all around us in our connected lives too and we need to make sure we're constantly protected.”

Id X.

AnswerX = Kaspersky Lab

शाटर् कनेक्ट

Rules of the round• There are 3 separate questions in this round.

• 3 image slides will be shown for each question. All connect to a particular thing.

• No direct questions. Only pounces allowed.

• Marking scheme would be written on each slide.

• On pounces I need the exact answer. No funda.

+40/-20

+20/-10

+10/-0

AnswerGmail

+40/-20

+20/-10

+10/-0

AnswerTech products named after the daughters of their creators

1. MySQL is named after My, the daughter of Michael Widenius

2. Apple LISA is named after Lisa Brennan, the daughter of Steve Jobs

3. Siri is named after the daughter of Dag Kittlaus

+40/-20

+20/-10

+10/-0

AnswerUber

िरटेन राउंड

Rules of the round• 8 separate image slides in this round.

• All images are of old logos of different tech companies.

• Write down the name of the tech company whose logo is being depicted on a sheet of paper.

• +5 for each correct answer. No negative marks.

• Bonus +20 marks if you get all 8 answers correct.

• The team sitting besides you has written the wrong answer. Don’t copy.

Q - 1

Q - 2

Q - 3

Q - 4

Q - 5

Q - 6

Q - 7

Q - 8

Answers1. Xerox 2. Palm Inc. 3. IBM 4. Nokia 5. Kodak 6. Siemens 7. Canon 8. Samsung

लॉन्ग कनेक्ट

Rules of the round• 9 image slides will be shown. All have something

in common.

• No direct questions. Only pounces allowed.

• Teams can attempt the overall connect at any slide. Marks allotted for the overall connect would be written at the top of each slide.

• On pounces I need the exact answer. No funda.

+160/-80

+140/-70

+120/-60

+100/-50

+80/-40

+60/-30

+40/-20

+20/-10

+10/-0

AnswerTech companies founded by husband-wife pair 1. ShopClues.com - Sandeep and Radhika Aggarwal 2. MobiKwik - Bipin Preet Singh & Upasana Taku 3. Kaspersky Lab - Eugene & Natalya Kaspersky 4. Slideshare - Rashmi Sinha & Jonathan Boutelle 5. VMware - Diane Greene & Mendel Rosenbaum 6. Bebo - Michael & Xochi Birch 7. Six Apart - Ben & Mena Trott 8. Flickr - Stewart Butterfield & Caterina Fake 9. Cisco - Sandy Lerner & Leonard Bosack

So long, and thanks for all the quiz.

One more thing…

Bouquets or Bazookas?1. www.facebook.com/sugrabheeta

2. www.twitter.com/sugrabheeta

3. www.instagram.com/sugrabheeta

4. www.slideshare.net/sugrabheeta

5. sugrabheeta@gmail.com