Dan Ni
| Dan Ni | |
| Noted subjects | The Chard Chrain, Cloby Twan, Geoffwee Wu |
| Past colleges | Cornell (2019–2023) |
| High school | Langley (2015–2019) |
| Stats | HDWhite • NAQT |
Dan Ni was a player for Cornell. He played for Langley in high school. He is well-known and respected within the community for his contributions to the Science Bowl Discord server. In addition to being a highly-regarded player, he is widely regarded as one of the best active writers, editors, staffers and playtesters in quizbowl.
Career
After a last minute promotion, Dan made one or two critical buzzes on the road to Cornell's 2nd Place Undergraduate finish at 2021 ACF Nationals. He parlayed this victory into a long and fruitful career as Cornell's club president for the next two years. His hard work finally paid off when he was ranked 94th in Amogh Kulkarni's Top 100 Player Ranking. He capped off his final year by reverse leading the national-title adjacent Cornell B team in scoring at 2023 ACF Nationals. Ultimately, he graduated from Cornell as the most successful science player of the 2010s.
Dan improves as the difficulty and obscurity of the questions increases, making him a highly sought-after teammate for Only Connect. In addition to being the top scorer on his team in Rounds 1 and 12 and at the 2022 Chicago Open, he managed to achieve more than twice the PPG of anyone else at the premier site of the near-impossible 2022 The Query of the Leisure Class while playing with James Sinjames, james owofice, and Keven.
Today, as a college graduate, Dan is widely recognized as one of the two or three best active middle school science players in the country.
Ni Polygon Scale
In January 2024, Dan unveiled the Ni Polygon Scale, an innovative quizbowl difficulty scale in which set difficulty is represented using polygons. Under this scale, the difficulty and subjective "feel" of sets are visually represented using various properties, including but not limited to: the number of sides, relative side lengths, relative interior angles and colors of the polygon.
Soon after the release of the Ni Polygon Scale, Jeremy Cummings and Marc Calza released the competing Cummings–Calza scale, which utilizes mathematical objects with varying dimensionality as the primary index by which difficulty is compared. A conflict quickly ensued between Ni and Cummings that would last several weeks, during which time the two engaged in a series of lengthy Discord arguments over which difficulty system should become the new standard. The dispute eventually ended when the two were banned from the Wolf Den Discord server. This conflict has since been dubbed the Ni–Cummings difficulty feud.