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Hans Woyda Knockout Round 1 vs Latymer Upper School

Once again I kicked off the spring term faced with the daunting task of whittling the squad of 12 Hans Woyda competitors down to a final team of 4 to take on the knockout rounds in pursuit of the coveted Hans Woyda trophy. The selection tests were hotly contested, even requiring a tie-breaker question in the case of the U8ths, but eventually Yidong (4th), Shyamak (6th), Adavya (L8th) and Eason (U8th) emerged as the best of the best. Their first match for this stage of the competition took place last Friday, with a home fixture against Latymer Upper School. 

As the Latymer side took their seats I was buoyed by the sight of the best audience we have ever had for a Hans Woyda match courtesy of Dr Stoyanov and Mr Morris’ after-school problem solving group. Any fears of disruption from the back were unfounded and they were remarkably respectful throughout; indeed, the only sounds they made during the questions were scribbling noises as they attempted to find the answers themselves for their own satisfaction! Once our opponents had settled into their places we dived into the starter questions, and thirty seconds later a rocky start by Latymer gave us an early lead. They were more successful on the next set, but even so we ended the first section with an 8 point buffer which helped to relax the team’s nerves for the geometry section. These questions proved challenging for both sides, with neither 8th form pair managing to answer either of their problems correctly, but an impressive performance by the Latymer junior pair allowed them to reduce our lead to 6 points. Up next were the arithmetic questions concerning decimal times tables, and while we managed to steal a point from Latymer a couple of slips allowed them to return the favour and reduce the lead even further to a mere 4 points.

 My early confidence was replaced by a slight sense of unease as the two sides worked away on the team question (which involved finding rational approximations to a selection of irrational numbers), but some errors from the Latymer side meant that we came out on top and widened our lead back to 6 points. After a pit stop for some sandwiches and drinks the teams returned for the calculator section where Adavya was the only one who managed to successfully extract his 15-digit Mersenne prime in the time limit, getting us back to the 8 point lead we had started with. The algebra questions concerned Euler’s remarkable prime-generating polynomial and were flawlessly tackled by both sides, meaning we maintained that lead into the race.

 A four question buffer is a nice place to be for the race section, but I’ve seen bigger upsets in my time and Latymer know how to provide them so we weren’t out of the woods yet. Yidong was bested by the first question, but his Latymer counterpart fared no better and so their chances of catching up were reduced regardless. The Latymer Year 11 lived up to his reputation next and cut our lead to three questions, but Adavya’s accurately deployed difference of two squares put us back up to four. If Eason got the next question we’d be home and dry, and while both sides missed the obvious trick it was Eason that crunched through the numbers first and simplified his fraction down to the correct answer, putting us 5 questions clear with only 4 to go and guaranteeing our victory. Both teams took a question each on the last four (with the final two questions evading both sides), resulting in a highly impressive victory for SPS with a final score of 55 – 45.

I have also copied the race question with which Eason secured our victory below; can you spot the trick that both competitors missed on the day?

- Mr Cullen Hewitt



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