As many of you know, I've been spending December back in the Bay Area, doing my usual work with a high-end caroling agency and visiting various friends in the area. Last weekend, both gigging and visiting peaked, followed by an abrupt drop-off Tuesday night. After a day and a half of happy faineance, I found myself in a mood to be busy again. In spite of having several things to do that would actually be productive in a wage-earning sense, I find myself more interested in chasing after answers in a certain trivia quiz.

An item from the blogger formerly known as Calpundit (now Political Animal, associated with Washington Monthly) -- normally the one political blog I follow regularly, but I've barely been there at all this month -- points me to the King William's College Quiz, reputed to be the "world's most difficult quiz".

The quiz is very British, both in the information it tests and in the puzzle-ish, oblique way it asks questions, reminiscent of those cryptic British crossword puzzles. The questions are grouped in 18 sets of ten. Each set has a theme, which in many cases is not explicit.

Among the commenters at Political Animal, the better claims were somewhere just short of 10 correct answers. (I was following the comments on Political Animal, but it wasn't until this afternoon that I followed the link to Crooked Timber, where I see the commenters are faring even better.) I got seven answers (1.6, 8.6, 10.6, 11.10, 14.7, 15.2), including one which I'm pretty sure is right but haven't actually confirmed yet (12.9). That might be eight if another guess of mine pans out (7.6), but I'm less sure of that one. Later I noticed two more which I should have known, but somehow didn't think of at the time (2.2, 11.3).

As the Guardian's accompanying article explains, the quiz is given to the students once before winter break, at which time the better scores get 20 to 25 questions right. Then a week later they get the same quiz again. Although they can't bring notes, they do have the intervening period to do as much research as they like, including asking for help from others. The Latin sentence at the top of the quiz means, "To know where to find anything is, after all, the greatest part of education," so it's as much a test of research ability as of knowledge.

In that spirit, I'm going to take a shot and see how good a score I can come up with before the answers come out on Friday, and that includes enlisting the help of any Benzene readers want to participate. According to the Guardian article, even after research, a 75% score is "exceptional". That seems too modest. I want to try for 100%. If you don't want to spoil your own trivia test, take a look at the quiz first and see how many you know. Then if you want to join in the research, take a look at my answers and see what gaps I've got that you can help fill in. I'm keeping my answers on a separate page off the blog because it's easier for me to format and update that way.)

Naturally, the Guardian article discusses the difficulty of creating a research trivia quiz in the age of Google. Even outside the quiz, my experience is that the notion that any bit of information can be found from Google is far from true. If, for example, one day I wake up and think, "What was the name of that medieval Italian guy who was locked up in prison and forced to eat his own dead son?" it's not at all obvious what words to put in the Google box. Even if I remember that he's referenced in Dante, that still isn't much help.

(I pondered a bit to come up with that example, but now that I've found it, I really can't remember that guy's name. It was some time around the era of Machiavelli and the Borgias, and the embellished history became a gruesome literary reference and subject for painting. I have a vague recollection that the English (ie, Latin) name begins with an "H" which is omitted in the Italian. Maybe I encountered it in an Italian opera libretto.)

With the quiz, my experience so far as that although Google is extremely useful -- I won't be home with my books until Monday night, so all my research so far is online -- it's still not getting me more than half the answers. For a few questions, the search words are obvious and the answer turns right up. For others, Google will get you there, but it requires some creativity and insight in choosing what to look for (not always keywords that are found in the question). For several questions, the list of results for the most obvious Google search is topped by three websites which reprint the quiz itself. For a few questions, those are the only sites that appear on the list. I'll be curious to see how long it is before Google searches start turning up sites like mine, listing answers. That would certainly save the King William's students a lot of trouble.

(On my answers page, I did include the "robots" meta tag that's supposed to tell search engines to stay out, but I'm not sure how well that works. I know that having a separate robots.txt file is supposed to be work better, but I don't think I can do that on my no-frills Earthlink website, since I can't get at Earthlink's root directory. If anyone out there knows how to make that work, let me know. Mostly, it's just curiosity for me. I don't actually care that much if King William's students find my page and steal answers from it.)

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