Ep 417: Ben Fisher, Ian Wanless (April 3, 2012)

As you may recall from last night, Ben has trekked through Africa.  He was there during New Year's Eve of 2006, and celebrated much as one might expect.  When he woke up the next day he thought that he had a terrible hangover, but as the day progressed delirium and fever set in; he found out at the end of the day that he had actually contracted malaria.  But he went to the snake clinic and was given some four-month old medicine, and was good within twenty-four hours.

I recognised tonight's challenger from early opening shots, although it has probably been twenty years since I last saw him.  It's mathematician Ian Wanless, who represented Australia in the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1987 (the year prior to me).  He works in the field of combinatorics, which he jokes is the methods of counting when you run out of fingers and toes.  Ian adds that people might have done permuations and combinations at school, and that's the start, but then you move on to more advanced techniques.  He mentions that it has a lot of applications, such as gene sequencing, designing codes for communication, and experiments with physical trials.  More information about some of it may be on his homepage.


It's decent wordwork from both contestants tonight, with sixes and sevens throughout.  Ben finds the longer words, but Ian gets back some of that ground in the first numbers game to stay in contention.  Ian tries the six small option in the second numbers game but the target is impossible to score on.  He tries it again a second time, and is unfortunately a touch too slow to get a solution down; Ben outscores him and is safe going into the conundrum.  Ben rounds out a good night's play by solving that conundrum after seven seconds, and is a deserved winner by 53 to 26.

I was on track for most of this, but I tried an archaism in one round that unfortunately turns out not to have made it into the Macquarie.  Two other rounds offered longer words than I found, one of them relatively common but not mentioned by David.  I finished it off with my fastest conundrum solution for a long time (subjectively, at least), and a comfortable win.