Ankur – Page 13

Code Wars 2013

I went back to my school this week after two years to help out my erstwhile computer club, the Code Warriors, with our annual technology competition Code Wars. The 2013 edition saw participation from 30 schools with over 500 participants.

The last one of these that I’d attended was Code Wars 2010, and I had no idea when this year’s event would be taking place. I only stumbled across it by accident on Wednesday this week (the event was on Thursday and Friday) when I saw a Facebook event for it, and got a message from our computer department’s head. Naturally, I signed on right away to help out!

I came away very impressed by the quality of the show put on by both the Code Warriors team and the participants. The level of competition was excellent, and indeed, in the few events that I judged and/or conducted, it was often tough to make a decision. Kudos to the participants!

What I truly enjoyed, though, was conducting the Senior Quiz finals. This has been my core event for years now, and my philosophy in designing it has always been to create questions where participants might just have the answers on the tip of their tongue – but need to go that extra mile to figure out what the answer is. And you can check out the different events for yourself by downloading the following below:

Senior Quiz: Prelims (PDF, ~360 KB), Finals (PPTX, ~12.5 MB; I had to use an Office format as all audio-visual questions are embedded for playback in the presentation)
Junior Quiz: Prelims (PDF, ~360 KB), Finals (PDF, ~1.25 MB)
Crossword: Finals (opens in a new window)

Many thanks to Raghav Gaur, Yash Goel, Tosshaan Thapar, Pulkit Jaiswal for helping out with making the Senior Quiz finals. (Those are the names I know contributed for sure, so in case I’ve missed any name out my apologies!) Raghav and Yash also get full credit for making the questions for the other events available for download here.

It’s funny seeing how pervasive Douglas Adams is still in Delhi’s quizzing circles. I consider it my biggest legacy here, but at least I’ve influenced a fair few people into reading one of the amazing series’ of books ever. 😀

Do give me feedback on what you think about the quiz!

‘The Fifth Estate’ review

The Fifth Estate is the highly-publicised film about the story of Wikileaks, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. While I have followed Wikileaks closely ever since its “Collateral Murder” leak of the US Army killing Reuters journalists in Afghanistan, for most viewers the entity of Wikileaks is something they certainly would have heard of in the news, but not know in detail about.

The story is primarily told from the perspective of Daniel Berg, played by Rush star Daniel Bruhl, an early Wikileaks volunteer who gets involved because he almost hero-worships Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder. The plot then follows the rise of Wikileaks through its initial teething stages, and eventual notoriety through its leaks about the US military and diplomatic regime.

Much of the attention around the film has been focussed around Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of the larger-than-life persona of Julian Assange, because of the rabid fandom Cumberbatch has accumulated in recent years because of his role in BBC series Sherlock. It’s only fair to take to Cumberbatch to task, then, for a half-assed effort, speaking in a British accent for most of the time and only occasionally slipping into stressing Assange’s Australian accent by saying “nitwurks” instead of “networks”. (In terms of bad effort, this was only slightly better than Daniel Craig’s “Israeli” accent in Munich – “The only blid that matters is Jewish blid”.)

A major problem with the film is that it feels like a dramatic reading of Daniel Berg’s book about Wikileaks, which is the source material for the story, rather than trying to stand as a screenplay of its own. Director Bill Condon – formerly associated with Chicago, Dreamgirls, and Twilight Breaking Dawn – feels like a terrible choice as he resorts to dated visualisations of rows of desks to try and represent the technical concepts in the film. A lot of screen time is devoted to watching people type on a screen in an effort to portray “the drama unfolding”. Yet, this misses the point: what makes the story of Wikileaks interesting is not the use of technology per se, but the confluence of different personalities that gave rise to it. The Social Network, for instance, was a film that understood this motivation well and focussed on the personalities rather than the technical details.

My friend commented that she learnt more about Wikileaks by reading its Wikipedia article rather than watching The Fifth Estate. In attempting a documentary approach, it misses the exciting story of the people behind the story as well as feels too long a film to properly portray all the events. The only redeeming feature was a fourth-wall breaking piece-to-camera from Cumberbatch at the end of the film, but by that point it’s a silly gimmick from a dumb film attempting to appear smart.

Rating: 2 / 5