The Tech Quiz

The Tech Quiz
IIT Kanpur Quiz Club
Quizmaster:
Anshul Roy

Instructions
• 1 Inﬁnite Bounce. 3 Short connects. 1 Written round. 1 Long connect.
• The answer to none of the questions in this quiz is 42. A team
answering 42 to any question would be sent to the Gulag.
• Hints on special request (valid only if the QM is in a good mood).
• The more you stare at the question, the more the answer stares back
at you.
• Kindly refrain from cybernetic investigations.
• While preparing the quiz, Wikipedia has been assumed to be correct.
• Quizmaster is Ozymandias, the King of Kings. His decisions are ﬁnal
and binding.

Memri TV memes serve as safety slides in this
quiz, keep an eye out for some easy chuckles.

इनिफिनट बाउंस

Rules of the round
• 31 questions.
• +20/-10 on a pounce.
• +10/-0 on a bounce.
• On pounces I need the exact answer. No funda.

Q - 1
“Arimaa" is a two-player strategy board game that was
designed to be playable with a standard chess set (image
on next slide). Arimaa was invented in 2003 by Omar
Syed, an Indian-American computer engineer. He was
inspired by a particular incident to design a new game
which could be played with a standard chess set, would
be difﬁcult for computers to play well, but would have rules
simple enough for his then four-year-old son Aamir to
understand. The name "Arimaa" is "Aamir" spelled
backwards plus an initial "a”.
What incident inspired the invention of this game?

Answer
Deep Blue defeating Garry Kasparov

Q - 2
Jonathan Badeen, the Chief Strategy Ofﬁcer of X likes to take the
credit for “inventing the Y”, when in reality he ripped it off from the
ﬂash-card app he worked on for the education company Chegg.
According to him, the idea for Y came to him when - “I was
getting out of the shower one morning, wiping the mirror because
the room was steamy, and I saw myself staring back at myself.
Then I wiped the other direction. All of a sudden it clicked. I
started thinking about the way I organize photos in real life. How
I’ll start out with one stack and eventually end up with two: my yes
and my no. Y would give you that same personal, sort of
manipulable experience. It mimics the real world, where you’re
able to pick something up and put it over there.”
Id X and Y.

Answer
X = Tinder, Y = Swipe feature

Q - 3
“In the year 2633, the evil Red Falcon Organization have set a base on the
Galuga archipelago near New Zealand in a plot to conquer the world. Two
commandos, Bill Rizer and Lance Bean of the X unit (an elite group of soldiers
specializing in guerrilla warfare), are sent to the island to destroy the enemy
forces and uncover the true nature of the alien entity controlling them.”
This is the main plot of a famous videogame. Although, when this game was
released in the North American market, certain details of the background story
were altered. The year of the setting was changed from 2633 to 1987, and the
location was moved from the Galuga Islands to the Amazon Rainforest. Bill
and Lance were also given the codenames of Mad Dog and Scorpion.
The title of this videogame refers to the Xs, a group of CIA-backed
Nicaraguan rebels who were frequently in the news in the USA in that period.
Which videogame am I talking about?

Q - 4
The person in this image (next slide) is Quentin Stafford-Fraser.
He is currently a Research Associate at the University of
Cambridge's Computer Lab.
In the year 1991, he wrote a computer program called
“XCoffee” (image on next slide). This was done in order to monitor
the Trojan Room coffee pot, which was a coffee machine located
next to the so-called Trojan Room, in the Computer Lab of
the University of Cambridge.
XCoffee was created to save people working in the building the
disappointment of ﬁnding the coffee machine empty after making
the trip to the Trojan Room.
What common technology did Quentin Stafford-Fraser thus invent?

Q - 5
“Project Valerie” is the codename for the world’s first automated triple
display laptop. It is constructed to be incredibly powerful yet mobile,
and gives users easy access to three eye-popping 4K displays. This
laptop was unveiled at CES 2017 in Las Vegas.
Which company has announced this triple display laptop recently?

Q - 6
In 1994, engineers at Apple code-named the “Power Macintosh 7100” as
“X” after the famous ___________. The motive behind the codename was a
riff on X's catchphrase "billions and billions", the implication being that
the Power Macintosh 7100 would go on to make Apple "billions and
billions” of dollars. Apple used the name only internally, but X was concerned
that it would become a product endorsement and sent Apple a cease-and-
desist letter. Apple complied, but its engineers retaliated by changing the
internal codename to "BHA" for "Butt-Head ___________”.
X then sued Apple for defamation in federal court. In November 1995, Apple
and X reached an out-of-court settlement and Apple released a conciliatory
statement that - "Apple has always had great respect for X. It was never
Apple's intention to cause X or his family any embarrassment or concern”.
Apple's third and ﬁnal code name for the project was "LaW", short for
"Lawyers are Wimps”.
Id X.

Q - 7
XKCD comic parodying what?

Answer
The Most Interesting Man in the World

Q - 8
In the year 1996, when the company X was rebranded and split from
AT&T, it's new logo was widely criticised.
X's logo, also called the "Innovation ring" was designed by Landor
Associates, a prominent San Francisco-based branding consultancy.
One source inside X said that the logo is actually a Zen Buddhist
symbol for "eternal truth". Another source said it represents the
mythic Ouroboros, a snake holding its tail in its mouth. X's logo also
has been said to represent constant re-creating and re-thinking.
X's logo was compared in the media to the ring a coffee mug leaves
on paper. This Dilbert comic strip is parodying this particular
speculation (image on next slide).
Id X.

Answer
X = Lucent Technologies

Q - 9
In November 2015, James Andrew Bates, was charged with ﬁrst-degree murder
after police found victim Victor Collins strangled and drowned in Bates’ hot tub.
In December 2016, police in Bentonville, Arkansas issued a warrant to X, asking
the company to hand over data from Bates’ Y device to help prosecute him.
Police records said that the Y, which Bates owned could have controlled the
music streaming, which was being wirelessly transmitted throughout the night
using Y’s assistant Z. During the course of their investigation, police
requested X to handover data in the form of audio recordings, transcribed
records, and other text records from Bates’ Y.
According to X, Y is always listening through a system of seven built-in
microphones but waits for a person to say the “wake word”, Z, to send it
commands. Y also records and streams audio to the cloud.
Id X, Y and Z.

Answer
X = Amazon, Y = Echo, Z = Alexa

Q - 10
X Interactive is an American computer software and social
media company. The company was founded by Darrell and Cliff
Lerner in 2005. The company went public in 2006. X Interactive
owns and operates FirstMet.com, an online dating website. The
company also owns The Grade, a mobile dating application.
On 6th February, 2017, the stock prices of X Interactive rose
suddenly from $4.5 to $15 (image on next slide). The reason
for such a sudden increase in the stock prices was because
investors confused X Interactive with another famous publicly
traded company, as they both have the same name X.
Id X.

Q - 11
This photo (next slide) is titled “Jennifer in Paradise”
and it was snapped by John Knoll in 1987 on a
secluded beach in the Bora Bora island.
The subject of this photo is John Knoll’s then girlfriend
Jennifer. At that time, the young couple worked together
at Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasfilm's special-effects
company, and were enjoying a well-earned holiday after
working on the film “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”.
In the world of technology, what is the significance of
this particular photo?

Answer
First Photoshopped image
(John Knoll and his brother Thomas Knoll created Photoshop. “Jennifer
in Paradise” became the ﬁrst image used to demonstrate the software.)

Q - 12
The company X was founded in the year 1999 by Alexander
Asseily and Hosain Rahman, two Stanford University students.
X was initially called AliphCom, this name was derived from
“Aleph/Alif", the ﬁrst letter of Semitic writing systems.
In 2002, AliphCom won a contract with DARPA, the U.S.
military’s research arm, to research ways for combat soldiers to
communicate with each other in difﬁcult conditions. AliphCom
began to develop a mobile phone headset designed to
suppress background noise.
In 2011, AliphCom changed it’s name to X, after it’s most
popular product, the “X Era”.
Id X.

Q - 13
On 1st February 2017, Japan launched a nationwide
“Green Initiative”. Japanese citizens were requested to
donate their discarded or obsolete electronic devices
like mobile phones, laptops, cameras etc. Around 2000
collection bins will be placed at offices and NTT
Docomo stores all over Japan by April 2017.
It is estimated that nearly 8 tons of metal can be
collected from these electronic devices. The aim is that
the metal collected from these devices will be used in
the production of something.
What?

Answer
Medals for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics

Q - 14
In 2015, Leon Gatys, Alexander Ecker and Matthias Bethge
presented a research paper titled "A Neural Algorithm of
Artistic Style” at the premier machine learning conference:
Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS).
In 2016, Justin Johnson, Alexandre Alahi and Li Fei-Fei, three
researchers working at Stanford University published a
research paper titled - "Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style
Transfer and Super-Resolution”.
These two research papers are believed to be the
technology used behind X.
Id X.

Q - 15
Although more famous for his endeavours in some other field, X has
also been associated with the world of technology.
In 2011, X was appointed as the Director of Creative Innovation by
Intel. X’s role at Intel includes conceptualising the next frontier of
interactive technology by acting as an idea generator.
In 2012, X launched an iPhone case (image on next slide) with the
motive to "turn your smartphone into a genius-phone”. X claimed that
the case would turn the iPhone's humble 8-megapixel camera into a
14-megapixel beast.
In 2014, X started his own wearable technology company Y and also
launched a smartwatch called “PULS” (image on next slide).
Id X.

Q - 16
The person in this picture (next slide) is Morton Heilig, a cinematographer
and a filmmaker who made documentary and 3-D films in the 1950s.
In the year 1957, Morton Heilig wanted to create “cinema of the future”. He
applied his cinematographer experience and developed the “Sensorama”, a
big and bulky arcade videogame (image on next slide). He patented the
device in 1962.
Sensorama gave the player the experience of riding a motorcycle on the
streets of Brooklyn. The player felt the wind on their face, the vibration of the
motorcycle seat, a 3-D view, and even smells of the city.
Sensorama was quite impressive for 1960s technology. However, it was a
commercial failure. The problem was not that Sensorama addressed the
wrong senses, but the reason was that the business community just couldn't
figure out how to sell it.
What title has Morton Heilig been accorded with?

Answer
Father of Virtual Reality

Q - 17
In 2016, Panasonic announced that it had reached an
agreement with X and would be investing $1.6 billion in X’s
new factory (image on next slide), which has been
estimated to cost a total of $5 billion. The factory is located
at the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, in Nevada.
X held a grand opening on July 29, 2016 of the operational
facility. The final factory is expected to be completed by
2020. The factory has been designed to optimize quality
while minimizing cost of production and raw material
utilization through vertical integration.
Id X.

Q - 18
X was invented by Fujio Masuoka while working for
Toshiba in the year 1980. According to Toshiba, the
name X was suggested by Masuoka's colleague,
Shōji Ariizumi, because the erasure process of the X
contents reminded him of a certain characteristic
feature of a camera.
Fujio Masuoka and his colleagues presented the
invention at the IEEE 1984 International Electron
Devices Meeting (IEDM) held in San Francisco.
Id X.

Q - 19
This country’s top-level domain was assigned to this country shortly
before this country ceased to exist. The country was to be assigned
a four letter domain, but was instead assigned a two letter domain.
After it formally ceased to exist, for two years this country did not
have a top-level domain, following which it was assigned a new top-
level domain which is now in use.
The old domain is however still in use, with the new government
and users requesting the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers) to not deregister it. In 2001, the ICANN
started accepting domain registrations with this top-level domain
once again.
Id the country and it’s top-level domain.

Q - 20
In January 2017, X announced it’s first digital assistant named
MIKA (Multi-purpose Intuitive Knowledge Assistant).
According to X, MIKA will improve telecom operators efficiency by
providing engineers faster access to critical information. It is
powered by the X AVA knowledge library, a repository of best
networking practices gathered from X projects around the world.
Using the knowledge library, MIKA can provide recommendations
based on similar issues seen in other networks.
MIKA is the first digital assistant trained specifically for the telecom
industry, designed to provide automated assistance that saves
time and frees highly skilled workers to focus on critical tasks.
Id X.

Q - 21
Id the guitarist. Why does he feature in a Tech quiz?

Answer
Django Reinhardt
The Python-based web framework “Django” is named after him

Q - 22
This is an emoticon which people use all across Europe. It became popular
in 2013. This emoticon is based on a gesture which has been given various
names like - “X Rhombus”, “X Diamond” and “Triangle of Power”.
Who is the inspiration behind this emoticon?

Q - 23
X is a brand of canned pre-cooked meat made by Hormel Foods
Corporation. X’s basic ingredients are pork meat, ham meat, salt,
water, potato starch, sugar and sodium nitrite. It was first introduced
in 1937 and gained popularity worldwide after its use during World
War II. Countries ravaged by the conflict and faced with strict food
rations came to extensively consume X.
X was quite popular in England, and in 1970, it even featured in a
Monty Python sketch called “X”. In this sketch, two customers in a
cafe try to order breakfast from a menu that includes X in almost
every dish.
The term X, in the technological context has been adopted from this
particular Monty Python sketch, because in this sketch X is shown to
be ubiquitous, unavoidable and repetitive.
Id X.

Q - 24
In 2009, Nortel Networks went bankrupt and
auctioned-off a portfolio of over 6,000 patents at an
auction in 2011. Google bid for these, but was
outbid by the “X Consortium”, which submitted the
winning bid of $4.5 billion.
Apple, Blackberry, Ericsson, Microsoft and Sony
were part of the “X Consortium”, which has been
accused of being one of the most fearsome patent
trolls in the tech industry.
Id X.

Answer
X = Rockstar Consortium

Q - 25
The lady in this picture is X (next slide), an
American novelist, dancer, and socialite. X was the
wife of the famous author F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In 1986, while working on a project, Y did
something to pay tribute to X as he thought that
her name sounded "pleasant and significant”.
How did Y immortalise X in the world of tech?

Answer
Shigeru Miyamoto named the queen “Zelda” after Zelda
Fitzgerald in the video game “The Legend of Zelda”

Q - 26
While Napster hurt the sales of many artists the most
notable ones to take legal action were Dr. Dre and
Metallica. But it actually helped the album sales of one
particular band, when an album released by this band
leaked on Napster, 3 months before it’s ofﬁcial release
and received over millions of downloads.
In October 2000, this album captured the number one
spot in the US Billboard 200 sales chart in it’s debut
week. It also became the band’s ﬁrst US top 20 album.
Name the band and the album.

Q - 27
In December 2016, X partnered with KFC to open a new
“smart restaurant” in Beijing (image on next slide). This
restaurant employs image recognition hardware which scans
customer faces, seeking to infer moods, and guess other
information including gender and age of the customer in
order to inform their food recommendation.
The facial recognition tech is unique to this one location,
though X has also previously worked with KFC on another
type of smart restaurant in Shanghai, where a robot customer
service agent can listen for and recognize orders made by
customers using natural language input.
Id X.

Q - 28
The “Open Compute Project” is an organisation (image on next slide)
that shares designs of data center products among various companies.
It's mission is to design and enable the delivery of the most efficient
server, storage and data center hardware designs for scalable
computing.
This initiative was announced in 2011 by Jonathan Heiliger, the VP of
Infrastructure & Technical Operations at X. This effort came out as a
result when X started a project to design the world’s most energy
efficient data center, one that could handle unprecedented scale at the
lowest possible cost in Prineville, Oregon.
X shared its designs with the public and along with Intel, Rackspace,
Goldman Sachs and Andy Bechtolsheim, launched the Open Compute
Project.
Id X.

Q - 29
The X effect is a term referring to the unintended consequences of a
company’s pre-announcement made either unaware of the risks
involved or when the timing is misjudged, which ends up having a
negative impact on the sales of the current product. This is often the
case when a product is announced too long before it’s actual
availability. This has the immediate effect of customers canceling or
deferring orders for the current product, knowing that it will soon be
obsolete.
The name comes from the planned replacement of the X 1, an early
personal computer sold by the X Computer Corporation in 1981. In
1983, founder Adam X pre-announced several next-generation
computer models, which had not yet been built, highlighting the fact
that they would outperform the existing model. Due to this, sales of the
X 1 fell sharply as customers anticipated more advanced computers.
Id X.

Q - 30
This is the LinkedIn profile of Ross Ulbricht (image on next slide).
Ross Ulbricht graduated from University of Texas, Dallas with a
degree in Physics and then went on to do a master’s degree in
Materials Science from Penn State University.
At Penn State University he started exploring psychedelics and
reading Eastern philosophy, and talked openly about switching
fields. He was disenchanted with science and became interested in
libertarian economics and entrepreneurship.
In 2009, Ross Ulbricht started Good Wagon Books, a business that
collected used books and sold them in digital storefronts like
Amazon. However, this business failed.
In 2011, Ross Ulbricht launched a famous e-commerce website
which eventually shut down in 2013. Which?

Q - 31
In March 2017, X launched a range of perfumes called
“Threat de Toilette”, featuring a number of scents, including -
“Social Enginoir", “Mal-wear", “Ransom”, and “Phish”.
In a press release, X said that - “Fear awakens our senses.
The men and women who wear Threat de Toilette understand
today's online threats and protect themselves against them.
Fear is no longer felt only in the physical world – it's all
around us in our connected lives too and we need to make
sure we're constantly protected.”
Id X.

शाटर् कनेक्ट

Rules of the round
• There are 3 separate questions in this round.
• 3 image slides will be shown for each question.
All connect to a particular thing.
• No direct questions. Only pounces allowed.
• Marking scheme would be written on each slide.

Answer
Tech products named after the daughters of their creators
1. MySQL is named after My, the daughter of Michael
Widenius
2. Apple LISA is named after Lisa Brennan, the daughter
of Steve Jobs
3. Siri is named after the daughter of Dag Kittlaus

िरटेन राउंड

Rules of the round
• 8 separate image slides in this round.
• All images are of old logos of different tech companies.
• Write down the name of the tech company whose logo
is being depicted on a sheet of paper.
• +5 for each correct answer. No negative marks.
• Bonus +20 marks if you get all 8 answers correct.
• The team sitting besides you has written the wrong
answer. Don’t copy.

Answers
1. Xerox
2. Palm Inc.
3. IBM
4. Nokia
5. Kodak
6. Siemens
7. Canon
8. Samsung

लॉन्ग कनेक्ट

Rules of the round
• 9 image slides will be shown. All have something
in common.
• No direct questions. Only pounces allowed.
• Teams can attempt the overall connect at any
slide. Marks allotted for the overall connect
would be written at the top of each slide.

Answer
Tech companies founded by husband-wife pair
1. ShopClues.com - Sandeep and Radhika Aggarwal
2. MobiKwik - Bipin Preet Singh & Upasana Taku
3. Kaspersky Lab - Eugene & Natalya Kaspersky
4. Slideshare - Rashmi Sinha & Jonathan Boutelle
5. VMware - Diane Greene & Mendel Rosenbaum
6. Bebo - Michael & Xochi Birch
7. Six Apart - Ben & Mena Trott
8. Flickr - Stewart Butterﬁeld & Caterina Fake
9. Cisco - Sandy Lerner & Leonard Bosack

So long, and thanks for all
the quiz.

Bouquets or Bazookas?
1. www.facebook.com/sugrabheeta
2. www.twitter.com/sugrabheeta
3. www.instagram.com/sugrabheeta
4. www.slideshare.net/sugrabheeta
5. sugrabheeta@gmail.com

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