Mechanics for Mathirang Mathibay 2016

I.

Eliminations
1. The elimination round is a 120-minute test, to be answered in teams of 2 to 3
members.
(a) Before the elimination round begins, each team is allowed to bring 1 alternate who can take the place of a registered team member should one not be
available.
(b) If all registered team members are present, however, then the alternate may
not take the test.
2. There will be 15 questions, each to be answered for full credit in a set time limit.
(a) The 1st question is worth 1 point and is to be answered in 1 minute; the 2nd
question is worth 2 points and is to be answered in 2 minutes; and so on, until
the 15th question which is to be answered in 15 minutes.
(b) All teams receive the nth question at the same time, regardless of how fast any
team answers any previous question.
(c) Each team is assigned a proctor to whom they will flash their answer on a
board provided.
(d) A team has unlimited tries for any given question.
3. The proctor will record the time tn when the team answers question n correctly.
(a) The smallest unit of time that the proctor will consider is a tensec, which is a
10-second interval. 1
(b) A team may belatedly submit its answer to the nth question (n = 1, 2, 3, . . . , 14),
but will only receive a fraction of the score inversely proportional to the amount
of time they spent answering it. 2 In general, for question n, the points Pn
allotted for answering it in time t is given by


n2
.
Pn (t) = min n,
t
(c) The final score F of a team is F = P1 (t1 ) + P2 (t2 ) + + P15 (t15 ), rounded to
one decimal digit.3
4. The organizers will not entertain any complaints during the test. We shall only
accept complaints in the first 30 minutes after time is up.
5. The top 25 teams will be announced at most 30 minutes after no more complaints
are being entertained.
1

See Appendix, Example 1.

See Appendix, Example 2.
3
See Appendix, Example 3.
2

6. Ties are broken in the following steps. Suppose k teams are tied, each with final
score F (to one decimal digit).
Disclaimer: The organizers will not extend the precision to 2 decimal digits.
Step 1: Each of the teams has a best question, which is the highest-numbered question
that they were able to answer within time limit (i.e. for full credit. Late
answers are not considered). These question numbers are ranked.
Step 2: If ties persist from Step 1, we rank their second-best question, and so on.
Step 3: If ties persist from Step 2, we rank the times tn in which they answered their
best question, their second best question, and so on (up to a precision of 1
tensec).
Step 4: If ties persist from Step 3, then all remaining tied teams are accepted into the
oral round.
7. The decision of the academic committee of UPMMC is final.

II.

Oral round

1. The oral round consists of 35 questions with varying time limits, not necessarily in
increasing order.
(a) The questions are grouped into 10 tiers of 3 questions each, plus 1 prefinal tier
of 5 questions.
(b) The tiers are approximately in increasing order of difficulty, each of which may
carry a common theme.
(c) The points Pn for answering question n is given recursively by

(
P0 = 0;


j n k
for n 0.
Pn+1 = Pn + 12
3

2. At the end of tiers 1 to 10, the 2 lowest-ranking teams are eliminated.

(a) If more than 2 teams are tied at the lowest 2 ranks at the end of any of the
first 10 tiers, then the tied teams are subjected to a time trial of 2 questions,
with similar mechanics as the elimination round. One question has time limit
15 seconds and the other question has time limit 30 seconds, for 10 and 20
points, respectively, to be answered in 1 minute.
(b) If none of the tied teams manage to improve their score, then all of them are
eliminated.
(c) If because of Rules 2.(a) and 2.(b) there are less than the prescribed number
of teams in play in any of the first 10 tiers, no team will be eliminated. 5
(d) If at any tier there are less than 5 teams left, we will proceed immediately to
the final round.
3. In the 11th tier, if there are exactly 5 teams left, the 4 best teams will proceed to
the final round.
(a) If ties persist at the end of the 11th tier, the ties are broken in 2 stages (1):
a time trial of 3 questions, for 15, 30, and 60 seconds each, to be answered in
at most 120 seconds; (2) traditional do-or-die, fast-answer questions, until the
ties are broken.
4. Complaints regarding any question will only be entertained before the quizmasters
begin to read the next question.
5. The decision of the board of judges is final.
4
5

See Appendix, Example 4.

See Appendix, Example 5.

III.

Finals

1. The top 4 teams may carry over at most 20 points from their score in the oral
round, computed as follows: carry over = 20% of the difference between their score
and that of the 5th ranked team at the end of the oral round.
2. The final round consists of 5 waves of 3 questions each.
3. The three questions are given simultaneously, with a difficulty rating of Easy,
Average, Hard, relative to each other.
4. The teams have a total of 6 minutes to answer all three questions in each wave.
5. For the first minute, each question is worth 10 points.
6. In excess of 1 minute, the score for each question decays, with the Easy question
decaying fastest.
7. The formulae for the decay of each question are as follows:
E(t) = min{10, 0.4(6 t)2 }
A(t) = min{10, 2(6 t)}
D(t) = min{10, 0.4(t 1)2 + 10},
rounded to one decimal digit.6
8. Complaints will not be entertained during the course of any wave. The board of
judges shall be open to receive complaints within one minute after a wave ends.
9. Ties for 1st , 2nd , 3rd places are resolved like in the oral round, except the tie-breaking
questions are also administered simultaneously.
(a) The tie-breaker round will be for 2 minutes only
= 1 E(3t),
(b) The scoring for each question follows the tie breaking functions E(t)
5
1
1

A(t) = A(3t), and D(t) = D(3t).

5
5
(c) If ties persist at the end of the tie-breaker, then we will proceed with traditional
do-or-die, until the ties are broken.
6

See Appendix, Example 6.

Appendix: illustrations of scoring

Example 1. (Proctors precision) A team who answers correctly with a time of
00 : 03 : 41 gets the same timestamp as another team who answers correctly with a time
of 00 : 03 : 48, which the proctor will record as (3 min, 5 tensec).
Example 2. (Late submission) A team that hands in a correct answer to question 2
in 4 minutes (or twice the prescribed time) will get 1 point (or half the allotted score).

Figure 1: Points for question 2.

Example 3. (Final score table) The following is a sample score table at the end of
the elimination round. The times are fed to a computer algorithm that automatically
computes scores and resolves ties.
Time start
0:00
0:01
0:03
0:06
0:10
0:15
0:21
0:28
0:36
0:45
0:55
1:06
1:18
1:31
1:45
same for all

End (min, tensec)

0:00, 5
0:03, 1
0:05, 3
0:11, 2
0:17, 0
0:22, 3
0:32, 5
0:35, 0
0:52, 4
1:02, 0
1:04, 3
1:24, 0
1:34, 1
1:44, 1
1:58, 4

Difference (min)
0.83
2.17
2.50
5.33
7.00
7.50
11.83
7.00
16.67
17.00
9.50
18.00
16.17
13.17
13.67

Question no.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15

n2 /tn
1.20
1.85
3.60
3.00
3.57
4.80
4.14
9.14
4.86
5.88
12.74
8.00
10.45
14.89
16.46
TOTAL

Table 1: Sample table of timestamps and score computation

Points
1.00
1.85
3.00
3.00
3.57
4.80
4.14
8.00
4.86
5.88
11.00
8.00
10.45
14.00
15.00
98.6

Example 4. (Oral round) The scores, explicitly calculated from recursion, for the oral
round are as follows. Note that the scores are in increasing order, but the growth slows
down. This is chosen to minimize the variance and relative error of the scores at the end
of the oral round, as opposed to a linearly increasing scoring scheme.
Tier no.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

1st Question
12
47
79
108
134
157
177
194
208
219
227
232

2nd Question
24
58
89
117
142
164
183
199
212
222
229
233

3rd Question Max. no. of teams

36
25
69
23
99
21
126
19
150
17
171
15
189
13
204
11
216
9
225
7
231
5

Table 2: Scoring for each question, maximum number of teams per tier
Example 5. (Excessive elimination) At tier 3 there should be at most 21 teams in
play, only 19 will move on to tier 4, and only 17 will move on to tier 5. If, say, there were
only 18 teams at the beginning of tier 3, then no team is eliminated in tier 3, and then
only 1 team is eliminated in tier 4 to obtain the prescribed 17 teams.
Example 6. (Final round) Suppose a team flashes a correct answer to all three
questions at the 4-minute, 0-tensec mark. Then they expect to get 1.6, 4, and 6.4 points
for the Easy, Average, and Difficult questions, respectively.

Figure 2: Graph of score for each question, sample scores at t = 4.