Ep 259: Emily Hawker, Daniel McNamara (February 12, 2015; originally aired August 25, 2011)

Rounds: Here.

Disclaimer: I watched this episode when it first aired, and although I did not recall any of it I cannot rule out memory being a factor.


There's no pre-game chat with David and Lily this episode, which might be the show attempting to make up time after the earlier episodes filmed that day.  Fortunately, we still get to hear from the contestants.

Richard praises Emily's previous exceptional game, and asks if she was fuelled by chocolate.  Emily laughs and agrees that she was, and is most of the time.  Asked about when the love of chocolate began, she suggests that it have formed in utero, as her mother is also a big chocolate lover.  In any case, she has loved chocolate as long as she can remember, and was even the secretary of the Chocolate Lovers Society at university.

Tonight's challenger is Daniel McNamara, who wrote a program to help him practice for the show.  Further explanation reveals that this was a program to solve numbers games and to work out whether there is an exact solution or not.  (I agree that can be useful, but I think that there's more benefit using a programs simply to quickly generate games to play; one can learn a little technique from seeing solutions -- and I certainly found that somewhat useful myself -- but there's far more benefit to simply playing through lots and lots of rounds.)

Daniel used this program for a few days before the auditions, and adds that he thinks there's a lot of room to expand the program to make it more efficient, and a fuller approach to solving those problems.  I'll take this opportunity to point out the "Countdown" numbers game solver website, which I use occasionally.


Daniel starts off with a risky and ultimately invalid play in the first round, and thereafter there is very little difference between the contestants.  In fact, there was only one other round where a difference in scores happened; that time, Emily took the risk.  It paid off for her, however, and so she took an unassailable lead into the conundrum.  It was another tough one, and neither contestant found the answer within time.  That gave Emily her second win, 53 to 40.

I felt off my game tonight, particularly on the numbers rounds where I only just got answers down in time on two of them, and was too slow for the solution on the third.  An oversight on the letters in one round saw me fail to declare a better option, and I was also beaten by the conundrum.  The statistics make it seem like I played better than I did; I was struggling in many of the rounds.


As usual, details after the jump.