Dwight Wynne

Dwight Wynne
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Noted subjects	General
Current college	UCI (2008-)
Past colleges	UCLA (2004-2007)
High school	Capistrano Valley (2000-2003)
Stats	HDWhite • NAQT

Dwight Wynne is a biomedical engineering graduate student at UCI. Prior to this he attended UCLA and served as club president for two years, where his inability to use his powers of financial oversight continued a legacy of unpaid tournament fees both to and for the club. To date it is unknown how much the UCLA club lost under Dwight's leadership in never-collected tournament fees, how much it saved on never-paid tournament fees, or even how much the club still owes Dwight for various club-related expenses.

From 2000-2003, playing for Capistrano Valley High School, Dwight attended four HSNCTs. His highest team finish was T-5th riding Matthew Sherman's coattails in 2001. He was an All-Star in 2002 and in 2003, he was the tournament's leading scorer and led his team to a T-8th finish.

Dwight is known his ability to score lots of points and lead his team to respectable finishes despite not having good knowledge of any subject. Dwight is also known for repeatedly coming up with bad ideas, most of which are in direct violation of Weiner's Law #1. These include the Taco Bell Soap question, a surprise round at Aztlan Cup II consisting of five-word tossups, and a singles-style quizbowl format known as Quiz Bowl: Exile Island, which has thankfully not been used in an actual tournament. While Dwight and Ray Luo were both at UCLA, UCLA contributed arguably more bad ideas to quizbowl than any other club. In addition, it is believed that Dwight holds the highest words-per-post average on the hsquizbowl forums.

Tournament Editing and Writing

Dwight served on the editing team for Aztlan Cup II, where he failed miserably in his main job of repeat-eliminating. Dwight has also contributed small amounts of questions to such tournaments as Titanomachy and FIChTE, and is a regular member of the West Coast Freelance Packet Writing Syndicate. His first head-editing job was 2008's Zot Bowl, which was advertised as HSNCT level difficulty but featured wild difficulty swings.

Dwight was also the head writer and editor for the 2009 Science Non-Strosity.

Tournament Directing

Dwight has directed or co-directed two instances of TWAIN, two instances of Aztlan Cup, two NAQT Southern California High School State Championships, one ACF Fall, and possibly some other tournaments with varying degrees of competence. With the possible exception of Willie Chen, he is the most well-known non-coach in Southern California high school quizbowl due to his stints as tournament director and freelance moderator.

Formats Invented

BISCUIT

BISCUIT is an acronym for the Blatantly, Intentionally Sham CBI UCLA Intramural Tournament, and was conceived by Charles Meigs as a way to continue UCLA's participation in CBI in spite of the Student Union's inability to run an on-campus tournament by itself. Dwight modified the initial rules, added a few of his own, and gave the tournament its name. While the tournament itself is not notable enough to merit its own page, it included such exciting innovations as a one-third chess, one-third Yahtzee, one-third CBI tournament between two nonexistent Kazakhs and the awarding of twenty-five points for correctly answering tossups on crockery.

After the first BISCUIT Tournament, won by 1980 Fresno State, Dwight revised several rules, including changing from a 129-team bracket to a 65-team bracket, for BISCUIT II. Unfortunately, BISCUIT II was never finished, with several teams still in the hunt for the mythical championship.

Since Dwight left UCLA, the UCLA club has used the name for an actual intercollegiate tournament, rather than one of the intramural tournaments it runs.

C.H.I.P.

C.H.I.P., or the Competition for Hindering Intellectual Progress, was conceived as a part quizbowl-like game, part reality show shortly after Tom Egan suggested that "C.H.I.P" be included in the World Series Of Quizbowl (apparently similar to the World Series of Poker).

C.H.I.P. combines the four-quarter format with the excitement of Celtel Africa Challenge and the sheer stupidity of the standard reality show.

Notable highlights include the Face-Off category "Guess Which of You the Host Likes Better", in which the host just gives 10 points to the player he likes better; the fourth-quarter Physical Challenge; the Elimination Chamber; and the option of mutinying, or eliminating the host and replacing him with a contestant.

For a complete explanation of the rules, see Dwight's initial introduction of the format

Idiosyncratic Beliefs

Canon of Clues

Unlike many in quizbowl, Dwight believes in the existence of a canon of clues that behaves in a similar fashion to the canon of answer choices. Any sufficient easy answer selection can be turned into a higher-level question through use of higher-level clues.

Model of Difficulty

Dwight also has elucidated a model for tournament difficulty. Four benchmarks of difficulty are set by the previous ACF Fall, Winter, Regionals, and Nationals tournaments. The editors of these tournaments combine empirical data about how much and what was converted at various levels over the past year with an innate sense of what "should" be gotten to arrive at the difficulty level for their tournament. Every mACF tournament then uses the four ACF tournaments to gauge the difficulty of their questions. The ACF tournaments are used as the benchmarks of difficulty for two reasons: first, that they are edited by some of the best in the game, and are therefore least likely to fall prone to common errors such as difficulty cliffs and difficulty swings, and second, that they are played by a nationwide audience and freely made available after the tournament, so that all potential writers and editors have access to them.

The eight stages are:

Novice/Fall - Tournaments at this level are at or below the difficulty of ACF Fall.
Easy - Tournaments at this level are also suitable for novices, though they may include slightly harder clues and answer choices than Novice. High school national tournaments are often written around this level.
Winter - Tournaments at this level are at roughly the difficulty of ACF Winter.
Regular - Tournaments at this level include most standard college invitationals.
Regionals - Tournaments at this level are roughly the difficulty of ACF Regionals.
Hard - Tournaments at this level include most regular season open tournaments.
Nationals - Tournaments at this level are roughly the difficulty of ACF Nationals.
Post-Nationals - Tournaments at this level are harder than national tournaments.

Unlike Magin's tossup difficulty scale, this model does not give any explanation of individual questions. Rather, it is used to give an overall impression of the difficulty of the entire tournament. If the ACF editors feel that a tournament is too easy, they shift the target difficulty up one stage; if they feel it is too hard, they shift the target difficulty down one stage (in the case of ACF Fall, they just make it even easier). The new tournament then serves as the new model for that stage of difficulty, and the rest of the college circuit then shifts its target difficulty to match. In this way, relatively slow, controlled difficulty shifts can occur as the state of quizbowl changes.

Ryan Westbrook has argued that the model does not accurately reflect what happens in the game because the ACF editors will sometimes make questions easier to increase accessibility rather than because of any empirical data or innate feel telling them that the questions are too hard.