About the Nerd Quiz

The Game

The Nerd Quiz is a very simple quiz in which registered users may have a daily dose of general knowledge questions, directed at computer geeks, hackers, nerds, or whatever you fell like categorizing yourself as today. There are no prizes to be won. But we have a cool highscore list with knowledgeable people on the top, and you may team up with your geeky friends to compete against other teams of nerds.

The Questions

On each round you receive three questions that you must answer within three minutes. If you do not answer within time, the questions will be considered wrong, and your score will be affected.

You can not play all the time. After receiving a dose of questions, you will have to wait at least 11 hours and 55 minutes before playing again.

There are two kinds of questions: Single choice and multiple choice. For single choice questions, you are presented with a text input field and a template describing the pattern of the correct answer. In the template, letters are shown as 'x', digits as '#', and all other characters are shown as is. Upper and lower case letters are treated the same, and all letters are US ASCII (a-z) only. No accented characters.

Multiple choice questions are rendered as a sequence of radio buttons. One of the buttons represent the right answer, while all the others represent wrong answers.

The questions are not supposed to be too hard. The quiz has a built in judgement system that works like this: If a question is answered by more than 10 people, and less than 25% has answered correctly, the question is considered too hard, and is removed from the quiz.

All scores are updated as if the question had never existed. Multiple choice questions are removed if the correctness is less than 15% above the exptected result if answers are selected randomly.

The Scores

The score calculated for each user is simply the ratio of correct answers to number of questions asked, times 10000. Almost simply, that is. To reduce the luck factor, you won't get a full score before having answered at least 50 questions.

Note that scores may be updated even when you do not play. Hard questions are automatically removed, and editors may correct wrong questions. In both cases scores are updated as if the question had never existed.

The Author

The Nerd Quiz was written by Sverre H. Huseby just for fun. Just for fun means that nobody pays Sverre to write this program. He happens to be one of those geeks who program just because he enjoys it. Weird guy. If you want to reach him directly, you may send a mail to shh@thathost.com.

Tickets?

Some people wonder why Nerd Quiz tells them that they lack a valid ticket. To learn what those tickets are good for, read my text on Client-side Trojans.