Irvine : Race Goes to Those Fastest With the Facts

On one side sat four students whose team, Alpha Epsilon Delta, was named after their premed honorary society.

On the other side, the competing four students had an amusing non-name: The Team With No Name.

And at the lectern between them stood Randy Lewis, director of student activities at UC Irvine.

The scene Thursday was the beginning of UCI’s sixth annual College Bowl competition. Teams of four students each are challenging one another through Feb. 3, with top individuals to gain berths on the UCI 1986 All-Star Team that will enter Western regional competition in May.

College Bowl is a brainpower contest modeled after a television program of the 1960s that pitted college teams throughout the nation against one another. The TV show has long since died, but College Bowl as a national competition was revived in 1976. UC Irvine’s College Bowl team won the Western Regional in 1983 and 1984 and was runner-up to UC Berkeley in the regional last year.

Lewis, emcee and question-master, blew a whistle to start the game. One question: “It is sometimes called Ludolph’s number, in honor of the 16th-Century Dutch mathematician who computed its value to 35 places. It’s now known to more than 100,000 decimal places.”

Gary Schuck, a sophomore from Chino on The Team With No Name, was the first to flash the answer light. “It’s pi,” said Schuck.

“Correct,” said Lewis.

But although the answer helped The Team With No Name to rally to a brief lead in the second half, Alpha Epsilon Delta later surged ahead. Final score: Alpha Epsilon Delta, 70; The Team With No Name, 30.