Titanomachy

Titanomachy (meaning "clash of the Titans") is a tournament held by the Alabama Academic Quizbowl Team at the University of Alabama and mirrored at various locations around the country. It was first held on 27 October, 2007. The questions were written by a combination of Seth Teitler, Matt Weiner, and Eric Mukherjee, among others, and were roundly praised afterwards for their quality.

Titanomachy 2007

A Call to Arms, or How Titanomachy was Written

Originally, Matt Weiner and Eric Mukherjee were to write the whole thing themselves (Eric the science, Matt everything else). Eric realized that he'd never finish 80/80 over the course of two months, and sent out an e-mail to every science type that he knew; only Chris Kennedy from MIT punked out, but Seth Teitler, Jerry Vinokurov, and Dennis Jang kindly assisted. This was not the first time outside help was brought in, however.

Three days before the tournament, Matt sent an mass e-mail to the quizbowl community asking for questions, because he had bitten off more than he could chew. In a heartwarming display of solidarity, several notable quizbowl personalities, including Dwight Wynne, Ray Luo, Ryan Westbrook, Evan Nagler, Andrew Hart, Eric Kwartler, and Seth Teitler, wrote several questions and helped coordinate the assembly of the set. It turned out rather well, if not a little too hard for its intended audience.

Alabama

With only four teams in attendance, the teams from Tulane, UGA, and Alabama (A and B) played a triple round robin. The (mostly correct) complete statistics can be found here [1], here.

Georgia handily won the round-robin, but needed a dramatic come-from behind victory over Tulane in the final round to finish undefeated. Alabama A was the runner up.

Mirrors

The 2007 Titanomachy was also mirrored at Minnesota and Maryland, with Brendan Byrne and Maryland A earning the championship at each site, respectively. Stats for Minnesota are here, and the Maryland mirror is here.

A Brown mirror was also scheduled, but no one showed up.