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 8
th 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
