I should learn to read more carefully...
Jul. 22nd, 2006 10:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Warning: this one's long, and I go into my personal past.
Just a few weeks ago, I participated in a contest at a Winx website. (Okay, Michael's site.) The only contest I had a reasonable chance at was the Jeopardy contest (I couldn't name all the episodes, and I was pretty sure that someone else would figure it out, I don't do fan art, and I don't do fics.) And so I "answered" the "questions" (well, the way Jeopardy does it), left it on the back burner, and emailed just a day or so before the deadline.
Later that week, contest results were announced. I didn't win, which I kind of expected, but I checked the honor roll list (that is, those who got all of them correctly), and I wasn't on it either. I checked the answers, and it turned out I had made a VERY glaring error in my answers.
Here's the one question I got wrong:
"It's the name of the school the witches go to in the realm of Magix."
"What is [the] Cloud Tower [School for Witches]?"
Except that I read it as "It's the name of the school the fairies go to..." and so I put down Alfea, and somehow, it went unnoticed. Big WHOOPS!
See, people like me are the kind of people who would spend a long time thinking about "How many animals did Moses bring on to the ark?" They'd see just "animals" and "the ark", and completely miss "Moses" (I saw "school" and "Magix" and completely missed "witches").
Not the first time I've been burnt by not reading the question carefully. I was once in a programming contest (I had already won a computer quiz contest a few months previous, and also finished 2nd in a programming contest at the same event, so I was highly confident I'd do great), and one question in the first round (the only question I was 100% certain I could do) invovled (now don't laugh) fat women and balloons. Basically, I had to write a program where the user inputs their (fat women's) weights, and (IIRC) the amount of lift one balloon gives, and the program returns the smallest weight. I thought it was a simple manner of using the MOD function in QBasic (the only language I knew back then). My program was rejected. I tried the program again, and I was thinking, "It can't be wrong...", so I essentially kept resubmitting the same program and saying "I'm pretty sure it's right..." In the end, I kept getting penalized, instead of getting a score (and a time bonus)... which by the end, probably wouldn't have offset all the penalties I had put up. (IIRC, every time I submitted and it was wrong, I'd get penalized something like 10 points, and if I had ever submitted right, I'd be getting 100 points, plus 1 point for every minute remaining in the contest. I must have submitted like 10-15 times, so my score would still have been negative.)
During lunch, I went over the questions again, and one thing caught my eye that didn't previously. The question called for the program to return the smallest weight that wasn't zero. Immediately I noticed my error: a MOD b would return 0 when a was perfectly divisible by b (say 42 MOD 7 = 0). Fixing the program would have simply involved catching the 0, and adding the lift back, and using that for comparisons. I don't know I said something like, "Oh man, why didn't I notice this earlier?!" but I might as well.
Moral of the day: always read every word, because every word is significant.
Just a few weeks ago, I participated in a contest at a Winx website. (Okay, Michael's site.) The only contest I had a reasonable chance at was the Jeopardy contest (I couldn't name all the episodes, and I was pretty sure that someone else would figure it out, I don't do fan art, and I don't do fics.) And so I "answered" the "questions" (well, the way Jeopardy does it), left it on the back burner, and emailed just a day or so before the deadline.
Later that week, contest results were announced. I didn't win, which I kind of expected, but I checked the honor roll list (that is, those who got all of them correctly), and I wasn't on it either. I checked the answers, and it turned out I had made a VERY glaring error in my answers.
Here's the one question I got wrong:
"It's the name of the school the witches go to in the realm of Magix."
"What is [the] Cloud Tower [School for Witches]?"
Except that I read it as "It's the name of the school the fairies go to..." and so I put down Alfea, and somehow, it went unnoticed. Big WHOOPS!
See, people like me are the kind of people who would spend a long time thinking about "How many animals did Moses bring on to the ark?" They'd see just "animals" and "the ark", and completely miss "Moses" (I saw "school" and "Magix" and completely missed "witches").
Not the first time I've been burnt by not reading the question carefully. I was once in a programming contest (I had already won a computer quiz contest a few months previous, and also finished 2nd in a programming contest at the same event, so I was highly confident I'd do great), and one question in the first round (the only question I was 100% certain I could do) invovled (now don't laugh) fat women and balloons. Basically, I had to write a program where the user inputs their (fat women's) weights, and (IIRC) the amount of lift one balloon gives, and the program returns the smallest weight. I thought it was a simple manner of using the MOD function in QBasic (the only language I knew back then). My program was rejected. I tried the program again, and I was thinking, "It can't be wrong...", so I essentially kept resubmitting the same program and saying "I'm pretty sure it's right..." In the end, I kept getting penalized, instead of getting a score (and a time bonus)... which by the end, probably wouldn't have offset all the penalties I had put up. (IIRC, every time I submitted and it was wrong, I'd get penalized something like 10 points, and if I had ever submitted right, I'd be getting 100 points, plus 1 point for every minute remaining in the contest. I must have submitted like 10-15 times, so my score would still have been negative.)
During lunch, I went over the questions again, and one thing caught my eye that didn't previously. The question called for the program to return the smallest weight that wasn't zero. Immediately I noticed my error: a MOD b would return 0 when a was perfectly divisible by b (say 42 MOD 7 = 0). Fixing the program would have simply involved catching the 0, and adding the lift back, and using that for comparisons. I don't know I said something like, "Oh man, why didn't I notice this earlier?!" but I might as well.
Moral of the day: always read every word, because every word is significant.