Human vs. Computer Competition: Oct 19 (Bay Area and Boston), Nov 24 (Online)

[Jordan Lee Boyd-Graber]

Dear Trivia Enthusiasts,

tl;dr: Chance to stump, beat, or create computers that play trivia.
Please play or spread the word!

As you may know, we’ve had previous competitions where humans could
take on computers in trivia competitions. In the past, we’ve had
competitions where computers compete with humans in how they answer
questions:
https://www.youtubeeducation.com/watch?v=bYFqMINXayc

And competitions to see how well computers could answer questions that
trivia enthusiasts wrote:
https://sites.google.com/view/qanta/past-events/2018-hcqa-answering-and-authoring

We’re doing this competition again this year! We’re doing this not
just because models have gotten better but because we’re specifically
trying to measure how well the models can decide whether or not they
know the answer. In the CS literature, this is called “calibration”,
but QBers know this as “buzzer skill”: buzzing in the second you have
the answer and avoiding negs.

We have a few different opportunities for members of the quizbowl
community to get involved this year:

1. Write questions: Submit questions that challenge models to earn prizes!
https://sites.google.com/view/qanta/2024-competition/for-authors

2. Play questions: Play against models on the QANTA set, available
for mirrors on October 19 (Bay Area and Boston) and Nov 24 (Online)
https://sites.google.com/view/qanta/2024-competition/for-human-players

3. Submit models: Community members can even submit their own models
for the competition.
https://sites.google.com/view/qanta/2024-competition/for-computer-teams

More details are available on the above links.

We hope you'll consider participating. Regardless, we'd appreciate it
if you could send this message to your organization members or other
interested members of the quizbowl community (I've also put links to X
and Facebook links to reshare below). In addition, if you’re
interested in having a QANTA mirror alongside one of your events, we'd
love to collaborate with you (either for this event or for something
in the future!).

Social media posts you can amplify if you'd rather do it that way:

X Post:
https://twitter.com/boydgraber/status/1844085451063529629

FB Post:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/zvyiy5euzEFzdEWE/

If anything is unclear or confusing (either in social media, this
e-mail, or especially the webpage), even if you're not planning on
participating yourself, please let us know so we can do better next
time or clear things up for others.

Many thanks!

Best,

Jordan

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Jordan Boyd-Graber
Professor
University of Maryland: CS, iSchool, UMIACS, LSC

Voice: 920.524.9464
j...@umiacs.umd.edu
http://boydgraber.org
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