CANONEXPANSION
| CANONEXPANSION | |
|---|---|
| Competition season | 2019 |
| Head editor(s) | Geoffrey Chen |
| Difficulty | Open |
| First mirror | May 26, 2019 |
| Announcement | link |
| Packets | link |
- Not to be confused with Canon expansion.
CANONEXPANSION (Creating Additional Names Or New EXtra Possible Answers Now Science Is Only Natural) was a difficult open science side event written by Geoffrey Chen, with contributions from Vishwa Shanmugam and Akshay Govindan. It had 6 packets of 20 tossups with superpowers.
The set was considered to have lived up to its name and successfully "expanded the canon": many of its questions entered interesting new territory, while remaining accessible. The intentional difficulty variation, with a 30/50/20 split between answers that would be appropriate medium parts at ACF Fall/Regionals/Nationals, had less favorable reception.
Mirrors
The HSNCT site had many logistical issues. It started extremely late and took forever to resolve protests and rebracket, did not have enough rooms or buzzers, and four teams only heard 11 questions in round 4 because one moderator read part of the wrong packet. Both "Elitzur-Why Man Bomb" (Noah Chen, Sarah Wang, Sam Rombro, Ophir Lifshitz) and "Illini Generations" (Billy Busse, Andrew Wang, Auroni Gupta, Mike Etzkorn) tied for first with a 5–1 record. Jonathen Settle was the top scorer and had the most powers. Billy had the most superpowers and the second-most powers.[1]
The Carleton site occurred after a mirror of 2019 Oxford Open. The upper room was won by Ian Dewan.[2]
The Columbia site was held as part of the NYC Summer Open weekend. It was won by Daniel Hothem and "Christ Manners." Stephen Eltinge was the top scorer and also had the most superpowers and most powers.[3]
The Chicago Open site was a nine-person shoot-out. Eric Mukherjee pulled narrowly ahead of Kai Smith over the first five rounds. It was by far the strongest of any field: 47.5% of questions were superpowered, another 31.5% were powered, there were only 18 gets, and only 4 questions went dead. Eric, Kai, and Kevin Wang all got more superpowers than any other player at any of the other sites, despite playing alongside one another.[4]