Fruit Machine Chat

spoke to a guy who would like to set questions for swp's (not me!).Anybody knows who the question makers are and how to get into this(contacts if possible please).I assume Billy no-mates is into this and I think Burns and Porter used to supply questions(told the Burns relates to Gordon Burns family) and no Im not trying to improve my chances by befriending a potential question setter . Thanks.

cool wrote:I assume Billy no-mates is into this

50 members of the Fruitchat quiz machine community are all thinking "Does he mean ME?"

As for your question, there has been someone posting on here previously who set questions for (amongst other things) the Pepsi Quiz so maybe they will read this and reply. Failing that, contacting the machine companies directly would seem to be the obvious next move. I'd have thought you'd have all their numbers on speed-dial by now...

I thnik there are currently about 7 members of the fruitchat quiz community.

Does he mean me?

I assumed BNM was a reference to Brewis, as his one and only friend and representive on Earth mentioned on here that he compiled questions. And he along with the Litten Tree is one of cool's prime obessions.

BNM was a phrase coined by Quizmaster that I much appreciated at the time- Quizard you are a master of deduction!

Nil Satis wrote:50 members of the Fruitchat quiz machine community are all thinking ...

... phew!

(lots of mates, and that's even BEFORE you count my imaginary ones ).

It's a good question. I don't think Brewis' mob have done any setting for quiz machines and I don't know anyone else who does (or at least is prepared to admit to having done so). Burns & Porter might be a possible - I've only heard from them in the pub quiz context but they might do SWPs as well - they have a weirdly limited on-line presence I must say.

My suspicion is that the manufacturers probably use a very mixed range of sources for the questions for the average machine to prevent any one setter being able to nail the machine (it's unclear to me how practically they could stop setters from playing the machines even if they put appropriate undertakings etc. by the setter in the contract).

xyz

to prevent cheating, I understand they use one person to write the questions and another to write the answers

pokerpete wrote:to prevent cheating, I understand they use one person to write the questions and another to write the answers

LOL .... seems like it sometimes

For me the same protection exists against question writers as it does against anyone else as long as there is some checking of the questions or more specifically the four answers.

Say you have just been asked to write 500 spoiler questions, where the question itself is tricky and the set of answers are all equally plausible - either four consecutive years or the list-based ones like the 'Films of 1938-1955' from Deal or No Deal. Even the fact of writing the questions doesn't make it much easier to remember which of 1932, 1933, 1934 and 1935 some obscure film was released in.

However to benefit in the future from having written such questions you could either

(a) always have the correct answer the same place in the sequence of answers (numerically or alphabetically) - either the lowest or highest so that you wouldn't be stimied by the games that have three answers not four

or

(b) have a list, either written down or on some form of PDA

You would get away with (a) as long as the company who paid you for the questions didn't bother to check to see you had done this, but you would hope that the games companies weren't that stupid.

As for (b) then the usual issues of retrieving information from a written list in a short space of time would apply. In addition you would only be able to use your list on those games where your questions were used and only on those occasions when the spoilers kicked in.

It's feasible to see how someone might use the fact they have written questions to gain some advantage but as with any of these things I would always be cautious about overstating the likely benefits.

Interesting.

I managed to write a shade over a 1000 questions within about a month. Of course, that was during lunch hours, when I was bored at home, when I was bored at work ( ). The difficult and most time consuming part is actually creating believable wrong answers! (I went for the correct answer plus three wrong answers for each one).

It's no use having:

"Who won the Barclay's Premiership at the end of the 2007/2008 season?"

...as a question, then the answers as...

"Manchester United"
"Preston"
"Ebbsfleet"
"Accrington Stanley"

Although, having said that, that would be suitable for the 'I'm happy' or 'early' questions.

Of course, for my set to be viable, I'd probably have to multiply it by about 15 (at least), but it was quite a therapeutic piece of work at the time. (I'm not Billy No-Mates too often! )

Edit: Sorry Mr Satis, I've pretty much stated the same as you re: plausible answers.

Don't worry. I'm just a bit miffed that you would think that my second team, the mighty Preston, the original Invincibles, should be classed with those other losers. And Ebbsfleet and Accrington as well.

Whoops...