The protest... (Before going into detail I want (speaking for myself) to thank R. Robert Hentzel for his thoroughness, and also to thank David Farris for handling the protest as best a protesting player can: Remaining calm, courteous, and deferential throughout, he was able not only to explain very precisely what his contention was but also to suggest useful research angles. If there were handbook on how lodge a protest with class, this would be a prime example. Anyhow, those kudos -- and my explaining of my part of the research -- were what motivated me to post this myself rather than deferring to R.) Berkeley A and Michigan A faced each other in the first round of seeded play, as #2 versus #3. Pending protest resolution, the clock ran out in the second half with Michigan A ahead, 300-295. If you don't care about mathematics, the short version is that after some research, we concluded that a question needed to be thrown out and replaced off the clock. By the time we concluded this, with all other results in, it was clear that this one question would not only decide the match but also literally settle which team would be in the final. Both teams strongly suggested that, under the circumstances, playing a full game would be much more equitable than letting one question determine their fate. They did indeed play that game; Berkeley won. (For what it's worth, Berkeley A had also defeated Michigan A in a Saturday morning match that was very high-scoring and neither close nor a blowout.) The question (typos, if any, are mine from retyping it): --- They can be designated by Hermann-Mauguin [MAW-gan] symbols, like 2- slash-m, or Schoenflies symbols, like [T sub h]. While mathematics permits an infinite number of them, the three-dimensional structures of crystals forbid (*) symmetry axes of order higher than 6, leaving just 32. For 10 points--name these collections of operations that leave at least one atom in a molecule, or a single point in space, unchanged. answer: (crystallographic) _point group_s (accept _space group_ before "infinite"; do not accept "crystal class") --- A Michigan player took an early neg with "tesselation"; once the question was complete, a Berkeley player rang in and said "crystallographic groups." On being prompted, he said "symmetry" and was ruled incorrect. Berkeley's claim was that the answer "crystallographic group" was sufficiently complete and correct that it should have been accepted rather than prompted. Michigan's counterclaim was that "tesselation" was correct at the point of the buzz; if their protest was accepted then Berkeley's protest would be moot. The protest committee decided to send teams to their next round and do research on whether "crystallograhpic group" would be acceptable. In practice that fell to me, using the stat room's Internet connection, at the temporary expense of updating results/stats. For various (obvious) reasons I wanted to get both a conclusive answer and as quick as possible an answer. If "crystallographic groups" were commonly used as a synonym for "point groups", I supposed that there would exist a resource listing the two as equivalent. If there is, I was unable to find it. On the other hand, suppose the term "crystallographic groups" referred not only to "crystallographic point groups" but also to groups that don't fit the clues of the question. I imagined that I could find a counterexample -- say, a paper that referred to "crystallographic groups" with an "axis of symmetry" higher than 6. Having found such a paper (it seemed to treat "crystallographic groups" as a synonym of "space groups"), I was prepared to deny Berkeley's protest. R., wanting better closure than that, did a Google search that the Berkeley team had suggested ( http://www.google.com/search? hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=32+%22crystallographic+group%22 ). Although I had run this same search and given up after finding nothing useful in the first few links, R. delved deeper and found reasonable, if not overwhelming, evidence that some mathematicians do simply say "crystallographic group" rather than "crystallographic point group." Discuss as motivated... :-) (Also feel free to send feedback to feedback_at_... about anything ICT-related.)
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