December 8, 2006
Moscow, December 8, 2006. The final round of Yandex Open Cup VII in Internet Search is over. Same as last year, Igor Makhaniok became “the Man Who Found Everything”. Now he is the first two-time holder of the title in history of the Cup.
Three superfinalists, the best of 1,950 participants of the Cup, met in the concert studio of youth TV channel O2TV on December 7. The Cup and the first prize (RUB 610,000) went to Igor Makhaniok, 22-year-old programmer from Minsk. Oleg Morenkov (Basel, Switzerland) came second, and Andrey Gavrilov (Moscow) took the third place.
To achieve victory, the super final contestants had to answer six questions. Igor Makhaniok managed to do it in only 8 min 3 sec, less than a minute and a half per question. The hardest challenge was to find “the first profession of ‘the Russian Arthur Hailey’” and “email address of the professor who failed to answer Erland Loe's question whether time exists” – only the winner managed to get answers to these questions within the time limit. The last two questions were the easiest (the complete list of questions and answers can be found below).
For the second year in a row, the Cup Super Final was hosted in the concert studio of the first youth TV channel O2TV, and this year for the first time it was broadcast live. A hundred of supporters in the studio, several TV cameras, and hundreds of thousands of TV viewers were watching the game. During the broadcast, the viewers could also search for answers to some questions on the web (naturally, their questions were not so difficult as those of the final round) and get prizes from Yandex.
Yandex Cup is an annual Internet search contest. Beside “the Big Cup”, competitions under Yandex methodology are held in various Russian regions and abroad – in Belarus, Ukraine, Israel, and the USA. This year, search contests crossed the boundaries of the Russian language for the first time ever: the first foreign-language Internet Search Cup is currently held in Norway.
Records of all the past contests, the results, and search competition methodology can be found at the official site of the Cup.
Here is the complete list of questions of Yandex Cup VII Super Final:
1. Composer of "The City of Gold" melody. (Vladimir Vavilov. His vinyl record "Lute Music of the 16th-17th Centuries" was released by Melodiya in 1972 under the name Francesco da Milano).
2. City where "the Prodigy Factory" was evacuated during the World War II. ("Prodigy Factory" is what Isaac Babel called the Special Musical School of Professor Stolyarsky in Odessa that produced outstanding musicians like David Oistrakh, Elizabeth Gilels, Valery Klimov, and others. The school was evacuated to Sverdlovsk).
3. First profession of "the Russian Arthur Hailey". (Ilya Shtemler worked as geophysical engineer).
4. Email address of the professor who failed to answer Erland Loe's question whether time exists. (Email is mentioned in the cult novel “Naïve. Super” by Erland Loe, a modern Norwegian writer - pdavies@physics.adelaide.edu.au).
5. Animal who recognized itself in a mirror in October 2006. (Elephant in the Bronx Zoo, New York, USA).
6. Average male life expectancy in Jamaica in 1994. (72 years).
