The Champions of Bull Hunt 2009. From left, Kok Seng (organiser), VK Chong, Razif, Alex (CoC), Teoh, Mawar. That guy (in red) yang beria-ia handling the winners' hamper is Sharin. I honestly don't know what he's doing in this picture!
From left: Goh Teck Koon, Venka, Jayaram and Alex.
Dinner shortly before the answer & prize presentation.
Fellowship while waiting for the answer & prize presentation.
Commotion during the pairing of teams.
_________________________________________________________
Holy cow! What a hunt!
The Bull Hunt 2009 must be the toughest motorised hunt I’ve ever joined so far. A tradition established by those freak hunters in conjunction with the Chinese New Year celebration. The CoC for this year, Alex Hoh, was in the mood to punish us all with his questions—he threw in all sorts of interesting dishes including salads, multiple semicolons, the Kepala Batas MP, and most of us became blind because we had to deal with masturbation too!
Immediately after the answer presentation, the organizer, Kok Seng, turned to me to ask if the questions were OK. With everyone staring at me, I had no choice but to give my approval. But of course I would really disappoint all my fans if I did not comment at least on some of the interesting questions.
I found Alex’s style somewhat different from the other grandmasters in that although he’s without doubt a celebrated cryptic ace, he threw in plenty of extra words which had nothing to do with the intended answers—they were included in the questions for the sole purpose of confusing the solvers. In some cases, those words had something to do with the storyline of the questions, but did not really add any value in assisting the solvers to arrive at the answers.
Alex also had an interesting tendency to repeat a particular format in his questions. Several of them boiled down to:
It’s not X but Y;
Or,
It may be X but Y is…
These are some of the questions:
Q11) Vehicle journeys back not in kilometres but in miles.
Q12) This is not a financial institution but margin trading is available here.
Q15) No red card but only a caution when it comes to a broken shin.
Consider the following question which also adopted the above style:
Q8) This Kepala Batas Member of Parliament may be sitting in the cabinet but isn’t aligned to any political party.
Of which at least 30% to 40% of the words in it were not necessary. But I will come to the specific discussions in separate threads later.
When compared to Jayaram’s and Margaret’s questions, I prefer theirs. They are more true to the cryptic rules in their questions. They hardly ever include words which do not assist in arriving at the intended answers.
Whenever I set hunt questions, I challenge myself to be economical on the words I use in the questions. Apart from connecting words for the purpose of satisfying grammatical requirements, e.g. the, is, are, a etc, most, if not all, of the words I use in my questions are there because they are necessary to be there. Those are the words I use to give instructions to the solvers on how to play with the letters to arrive at the answers; but also at the same time, I also use those very same words to deceive the solvers. I try my best not to include “useless” words which have nothing to contribute in arriving at the answers.
To be fair to Alex, however, it must be emphasised that the Chinese New Year hunts are designed as “no holds barred” outings, and the setter is expected to “hit bellow the belt” to a certain extent. Therefore it is possible that if Alex were to set an open hunt, he might not adopt a similar approach as that adopted in his Bull Hunt questions.
The team members were selected randomly by means of drawing cards, and I ended up with Sharin, Eng Siang and Rahmah. I was quite surprised that we quickly blended in well with each other. Exchange of ideas was also quite natural and free-flow. And there were plenty of occasions where we laughed out loud when someone came up with amusingly far-fetched ideas.
Sharin, who I’d consider the ad-hoc team leader for our team set a modest target of answering only 10 questions—a target which proved to be very realistic in the end. For the most part of the hunt, we struggled to achieve that goal. And by the time we passed the half-way point of the hunt, we were fairly alarmed that we might not even achieve that embarrassing target. Thankfully, however, we were able to come up with some brilliant analysis and barely conquered the 10 questions.
In the end, only 2 teams passed (more than 50% score) in the Bull Hunt. But the scores aside, I must say that we had lots of fun. I’m really glad that decided to join this hunt, and I am looking forward to the next one!
The Bull Hunt 2009 must be the toughest motorised hunt I’ve ever joined so far. A tradition established by those freak hunters in conjunction with the Chinese New Year celebration. The CoC for this year, Alex Hoh, was in the mood to punish us all with his questions—he threw in all sorts of interesting dishes including salads, multiple semicolons, the Kepala Batas MP, and most of us became blind because we had to deal with masturbation too!
Immediately after the answer presentation, the organizer, Kok Seng, turned to me to ask if the questions were OK. With everyone staring at me, I had no choice but to give my approval. But of course I would really disappoint all my fans if I did not comment at least on some of the interesting questions.
I found Alex’s style somewhat different from the other grandmasters in that although he’s without doubt a celebrated cryptic ace, he threw in plenty of extra words which had nothing to do with the intended answers—they were included in the questions for the sole purpose of confusing the solvers. In some cases, those words had something to do with the storyline of the questions, but did not really add any value in assisting the solvers to arrive at the answers.
Alex also had an interesting tendency to repeat a particular format in his questions. Several of them boiled down to:
It’s not X but Y;
Or,
It may be X but Y is…
These are some of the questions:
Q11) Vehicle journeys back not in kilometres but in miles.
Q12) This is not a financial institution but margin trading is available here.
Q15) No red card but only a caution when it comes to a broken shin.
Consider the following question which also adopted the above style:
Q8) This Kepala Batas Member of Parliament may be sitting in the cabinet but isn’t aligned to any political party.
Of which at least 30% to 40% of the words in it were not necessary. But I will come to the specific discussions in separate threads later.
When compared to Jayaram’s and Margaret’s questions, I prefer theirs. They are more true to the cryptic rules in their questions. They hardly ever include words which do not assist in arriving at the intended answers.
Whenever I set hunt questions, I challenge myself to be economical on the words I use in the questions. Apart from connecting words for the purpose of satisfying grammatical requirements, e.g. the, is, are, a etc, most, if not all, of the words I use in my questions are there because they are necessary to be there. Those are the words I use to give instructions to the solvers on how to play with the letters to arrive at the answers; but also at the same time, I also use those very same words to deceive the solvers. I try my best not to include “useless” words which have nothing to contribute in arriving at the answers.
To be fair to Alex, however, it must be emphasised that the Chinese New Year hunts are designed as “no holds barred” outings, and the setter is expected to “hit bellow the belt” to a certain extent. Therefore it is possible that if Alex were to set an open hunt, he might not adopt a similar approach as that adopted in his Bull Hunt questions.
The team members were selected randomly by means of drawing cards, and I ended up with Sharin, Eng Siang and Rahmah. I was quite surprised that we quickly blended in well with each other. Exchange of ideas was also quite natural and free-flow. And there were plenty of occasions where we laughed out loud when someone came up with amusingly far-fetched ideas.
Sharin, who I’d consider the ad-hoc team leader for our team set a modest target of answering only 10 questions—a target which proved to be very realistic in the end. For the most part of the hunt, we struggled to achieve that goal. And by the time we passed the half-way point of the hunt, we were fairly alarmed that we might not even achieve that embarrassing target. Thankfully, however, we were able to come up with some brilliant analysis and barely conquered the 10 questions.
In the end, only 2 teams passed (more than 50% score) in the Bull Hunt. But the scores aside, I must say that we had lots of fun. I’m really glad that decided to join this hunt, and I am looking forward to the next one!
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