VTBassMatt's Journal: StudioQB's Frustration

I forget which Slashdotter has the link to StudioQB's "Frustration" trivia game in his/her sig, but I finally got around to playing it. For those who've never played: it's 100 questions and you get an hour to complete them. You may use any resources on the Net or in real life to find the answer, and the game is supposed to be pretty freakin' hard.

I'd have to respectfully disagree.

I am not the brightest guy around, but I beat the game on my fourth try. The first three were times when I thought I'd rely on the ol' grey matter and not bother looking things up, but sometimes this stuff can surprise you...

Anyhow, the secret to beating this game is knowing what websites you need to keep open in Firefox tabs and having three crucial keyword bookmarks set up. Here they are, in no real order (probably the order in which I needed to look them up the third or fourth time through the game):

• Pages Open In Tabs
  • Scrabble data
  • Text of Abbott and Costello's "Who's On First?" skit
  • Internet Movie Database to look up movie release dates (hint: it's always the Spielberg film)
  • Blender's 50 Worst Songs list (this is someone's personal page since Blender has the list on two seperate pages with lots of junk included)
  • Time zone map of the USA
  • Wikipedia entry on US currency
• Keyword Bookmarks
  • Wikipedia (e.g.: "wiki South Dakota" in my address bar will take me to the Wiki article about SD)
  • Merriam-Webster (mine is called "mw")
  • Google (for the drug interactions; I actually have my address bar set to search Google by default so I don't have a keyword for this one)

Finally, one other thing you'll need early on is a way to test primality of five- to seven-digit numbers. Luckily, I have some Scheme code which does the fast Fermat test, because I couldn't find a good JavaScript implementation of this test anywhere on the web. The fast Fermat test says that a number N is prime if A ^ N mod N equals A (for any A < N). You want to try this test a hundred or so times per candidate N because it's not 100% accurate the first time. You can find a better explanation of the math somewhere on the Net.

Hope I haven't ruined anyone's fun with this game. For the record, I finished it in under 25 minutes... you can probably do better using the tools I've listed here.