Ep 23: Kashi Ross, Robin Wedd (August 8, 2012; originally aired September 1, 2010)

Rounds: Here.


Disclaimer: While I have not seen this episode before, I did play through the blue book (episodes 1 to 50) around ten months ago when I was scheduled to be a contestant on the show.  Additionally, I did a quick flick through it a few months back to collect words for my posts about word validity.


It gets mentioned that Kashi has travelled to over thirty countries.  Richard asks if she has a favourite destination, and Kashi responds that New York City is definitely one of the most exciting places on earth.  She has also spent a lot of time in India and says that it is very fond in her heart.  That is certainly a contrast!

(At the end of this piece Richard twice calls her Kushi rather than Kashi; I guess it was not considered worth a reshoot over.)

Tonight's challenger is Robin Wedd, an oceanographer with a PhD in physics.  Robin's job involves predicting the climate up to a year ahead, using all the observations they can get from the ocean and the atmosphere.  They combine that with a model of the oceans that they have developed, feed it all into a supercomputer, and analyse what comes out; the hope is that they can predict the ocean state about a year ahead.  So far it's OK to about two or three months with general climate results, but it gets pretty fuzzy by the year mark.


It was a close game that had the potential for a first; Kashi got out to an early lead in the first two rounds but Robin closed the gap to a single point in the numbers.  Kashi pulled clear a bit more in the next letters round, then an invalid attempt from her allowed Robin to get closer again.  Robin could have taken the lead in the second numbers round but made an error, and the net result was that Kashi was ahead by precisely ten points at the conundrum.  That could have led to a tiebreaker conundrum if Robin solved it first, but neither was able to and Kashi ran out the winner, 34 to 24.

My performance was a little mixed again, as I overcomplicated a numbers round and failed to solve it.  On the other hand, I did find the full monty on offer tonight, and that is always enjoyable.  I finished up with a conundrum solution in decent time, and overall it was a decent game.