Rare Entries
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A Rare Entries Contest is a competition or quiz consisting of a number of questions all which have more than one correct answer. Entries are submitting privately, often by email and entrants receive a score for each question equal to the number of people submitting the same answer. Entrants receive a score for their entry equal to the product of their individual question scores. Low score wins, so a perfect score would be 1, achieved by submitting unique answers to each question. With a typical field of 30 entrants, and a typical slate of 10 questions a winning score might be 200-600 and the worst score many millions.
The rules, as stated above, encourage competitors to search for obscure answers that may nevertheless by correct, often bending the intention of the quiz-setter in order to achieve that obscurity. This runs the risk that the quiz-setter may mark an answer wrong, in which case a penalty score is applied for that question.
Following the published deadline, the quiz-setter will publish the results, usually revealing the scores achieved by each competitor, the answer-slates of the top entrants and the number of people selecting each answer, with comments as to why certain answers were marked right or wrong. This generally provokes some debate, which may even result in rulings being reversed and scores amended.
Rare entries contests are generally played on Usenet news groups, especially rec.games.trivia and rec.puzzles.
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[edit] History
[edit] Matthew Daly
During the 1988-89 school year at Carnegie Mellon University, Matthew Daly ran the first Rare Entries contest for his chapter of Alpha Phi Omega. He was inspired by the recently released game Scattergories and wished to see if a modified scoring system would enable a similar sort of prisoner's dilemma strategizing across a field with dozens of players instead of 2-6. In 1996, Daly opened the first Usenet Rare Entries Contest on rec.puzzles. It consisted of 7 questions and the formula for wrong answer penalties was a score equal to the worst score otherwise achieved on that question. Keith Willoughby, the winning entrant, received a score of 294 and the worst over 2 million. Willoughby and Daly alternated moderation of the next several contests. In addition, Daly experimented with a "Common Entries" contest where the winner was the one with the highest product to reinforce the psychological aspects of the contest over the research-intensive trivial aspects.
[edit] Mark Brader
The most prolific and popular Rare Entries quiz master is Canadian Mark Brader who, in April 2006, published and scored his 50th Rare Entries competition, MSB50. MSB1 was part of the 1996 craze, but MSB2 waited until 2000. Since then, Mark has published a rare entries contest about every 4-8 weeks.
Mark has developed the rules of his Rare Entries contests in recent years, and others who wish to set Rare Entries Contests often adapt Mark's rules and use his awk script for scoring.
In particular, Mark's formula for wrong answers is designed set a penalty limit higher than any correct answer, but roughly proportionate to the spread of answers on that question and the number of entries overall. It is defined as the median of the number of entrants, the square root of that number rounded up, and double the highest correct score for that question. Mark also developed the "more specific variant" scoring in which a more specific variant of another answer is scored as if the two answers are different, but the other, less specific variant is scored as if they are the same.
A variant "Common Entries" type of contest has also been run by a number of individuals where the rules are roughly the same, but the high score wins.
[edit] MSB50
MSB50 included the question "Name (or otherwise identify) someone who has posted a Rare Entries, Common Entries, or similar type of contest to at least one of the newsgroups where I have posted this contest, calling for entries to be submitted by email." In the results posting, Mark noted that his name was the most popular answer, and that four entrants named themselves (one of these received the penalty score since her contest called for answers by web form). "Matthew Daly" was also submitted as an answer, and Mark took the opportunity to acknowledge the person who "introduced rec.puzzles and Rare Entries contests to each other."
