Monday 28 October - Statistics Pub Quiz, Frohlich Café Bar at University of Liverpool
Congratulations to the team from Institute of Population Health for winning the inaugural Statistics Pub Quiz! The Committee put in a decent performance… but were no match this time. We look forward to the 2025 event, most likely at the same venue! The questions, created and seen only by Alexandra (Secretary), were wide ranging, from general knowledge (football statistics!) to mean – median – mode and sequence puzzles, to statistician picture recognition, coding error-detection and statistical history.
Participants came from a number of departments at the University of Liverpool (though the event was advertised more widely), including the Institute of Population Health, Economics, and Strategy, International Business and Entrepreneurship. Both staff and PhD students took part, and we hope that the event will go from strength to strength. Special credit to non committee member Tom, who made the event as a highly entertaining volunteer quiz master – a hard act to follow in 2025!
Wednesday 4 December, Advent of Code
The Chief Historian was always present for the big Christmas sleigh launch, but nobody had seen him in months… Around 250k people worldwide (at the time of writing) decided to help by completing a series of daily Advent of Code coding puzzles, as many as they could, leading up to Christmas day.
We felt compelled to join the hunt for the missing man, and formed a taskforce of RSS Merseyside Local Group coders (led by RSS Committee member Alice-Maria, who provided solutions) to tackle the first two-part puzzle! The first step towards finding the Chief Historian, Day 1 of the Advent of Code, involved computing similarity scores between two columns of differently ordered repeated codes…
We did it. There were solutions with in-built or standard data structures, and also with data analysis libraries such as pandas. A range of programming languages were used, e.g. C, R and Python. There was a discussion of quadratic vs linear time!
Next time, we may hold a slightly earlier warm-up event before the start of Advent of Code 2025, and then perhaps we can also tackle one of the 2025 days.