Ep 327: Geoff Bailey, Eddy Hill (November 29, 2011)

Rounds: Here.

Disclaimer: I was a contestant on this episode.  Obviously there are some parts I will remember strongly and my scoreline cannot remotely be considered a fair representation.  I'll frequently refer to my past self in the third person, to avoid having to clarify all the time whether I mean my current or past performance.


The early show talk is about my job this time.  I work as a computer programmer (or software engineer, depending on how fancy you want to sound) for the Computational Algebra Group in the mathematics department at Sydney University.  We develop a computer algebra system (called Magma) that is a research tool allowing computations to be done with mathematical objects that are somewhat more esoteric and interesting than just numbers.

The challenger for today is Eddy Hill, another university student and trivia enthusiast.  Every Wednesday he goes down to the local pub with the rest of his trivia team, who are called... well, it sounds to me like he says "Dringus and Drangus Comedy Team", but I'm not convinced I've heard it correctly.  He says it is from the TV show Tim and Eric, which he is also an enthusiast of.  (Googling suggests that "Dringus and Drungle" might be more correct... it's all pretty inconclusive, though.)  He attributes the enthusiasm for trivia to just being bored on Wednesday nights.


Eddy was a standby contestant, unexpectedly called up to action when the scheduled contestant failed to show up and was uncontactable.  As such, he may well have been missing out on some of the preparation that a scheduled contestant would have had.


Eddy starts off well behind -- his six-letter words are no match for the sevens and eights that Geoff finds -- and it's not until round 6 that he manages to get on the board.  Geoff has a good game on the letters but unusually struggles twice with the numbers, on one of which Eddy outdoes him.  Despite this, Geoff remains comfortably ahead and an extremely fast conundrum solution seals a comprehensive victory, 65 to 18. 

There's definitely some memory help this second time around -- most notably in the second numbers round -- and it's those numbers which make the difference as the letters performance is identical.  I hadn't recalled that this episode had two difficult numbers rounds in it.  I'm not sure if I should claim the conundrum or not, but it's still a win in any case.

As usual, details after the jump.