The KuSakuraShop Judo Quiz #1 - June 2020

Results Breakdown & Analysis

Due to the COVID-19 crisis, the beginning of the year was quite frustrating for us Judo practitioners. With the closing of all Dojo and the temporary prohibition of practicing any martial arts, due to the unavoidable closeness of the two opponents who must face each other, we have been deprived of our passion.
This is in this context that we decided to handle a small quiz, to allow our customers to learn a little bit more about their passion while providing them the opportunity to win some valuable prizes.
Also, we naturally also organized the quiz to gather some email addresses for our newsletter (we always have been transparent with our customers, we will not stop now) to consolidate and enhance our audience.
It is now time to discuss some of the results and the process we implemented to handle this quiz.

First let’s see some stats

For this first edition of the KuSakuraShop Judo Quiz, we wanted to make an interesting quiz in order to provide some good knowledge to our customers. In this objective, we meant not to make it too difficult and this is why we have been quite severe on the removal of all duplicated participation.

• Total participation: 1608
  Represents all participants of the English and the French versions of the quiz, after cleaning of the wrong and double entries.
• Quiz Passed: 1353 (80% of all participants)
  This number includes all participants with the grade of 11/11 and 10/11 which were the minimum score to be able to be selected to win the JOF Judogi or the belts.
• Quiz Failed: 254 (16% of all participants)
  Reflects the number of participants who failed the first time at the quiz. All duplicates have been removed to give the most equal opportunity to everyone to win a prize.

Enlightenment to some answers

Some questions were quite challenging. Let’s give some explanations to these questions and their responses.

5 - How many highly notable Judoka has the Kodokan promoted to the 10th Dan so far?

Correct Answer: 15

We can give some complement on the background of this question. Indeed, 12 Judoka has been awarded the 10th Dan between 1935 and 1984. The last 3 Judoka to be awarded this honor have all been promoted in 2006 and are now the only 10th Dan alive nowadays. Also, we can note that only one woman has been awarded this high honor in 2011, Mme. Keiko Fukuda.

6 - Is Judo considered as a traditional (Kobudo) or modern (Budo) martial art?

Correct Answer: Modern

Indeed, Judo is a modern martial art. Kobudo (古武道) literally means old martial arts and gather a lot of old schools (古流) using armors, blades, firearms, etc… For instance, Jujutsu of which Judo is a true descendant, is a traditional martial art (古武道). Judo was the first martial art developed from traditional ones, this is reflected in its philosophy but also in the practice of the art itself, inspiring thereafter some other modern martial arts such as the Aikido for example.

8 - When did Judo become an Olympic sport?

Correct Answer: 1964

The answer was quite simple to all passionate Judoka. Although Judo officially became an Olympic sport in 1964, during the Tokyo Olympic Games, it was not the first time that Judo made an appearance in this famous sport gathering. Indeed in 1932, Judo was seen for the first time during a demonstration handled by Jigoro Kano himself.

10 - Before moving to Budapest, where was the International Judo Federation’s headquarters located?

Correct Answer: Lausanne, Switzerland. Because neutrality is all.

In August 2019, the decision was made to change the current location of the IJF headquarters from Lausanne, Switzerland to Budapest, Hungary. This news is quite recent and it is understandable that some participants weren’t aware of it.

11 - Which of the following sentences about Judogi is NOT true?

Correct Answer: The Sashiko fabric is woven vertically as opposed to some other arts like in kendo that are woven horizontally.

The false answer was the third one. Indeed the Sashiko, used in most Judogi nowadays, is woven horizontally while it is the opposite of Kendogi.

The answer to this question is hidden in one of our blog articles called "The story of the Iconic Judogi - Focus on the Sashiko fabric". The information is at the bottom of the article, just above the picture illustrating this specificity of the two Keikogi. This information is pretty interesting when we know the advantages and the drawbacks of the two weaving techniques. Naturally if you are interested to know more about it, you can consult this article at any time.

BONUS: Which of these celebrities is a Judoka?

Correct Answer: Chuck Noris, history books omited the fact that he is the only one who actually defeated Jigoro Kano!

A significant number of participants failed this question. Indeed, the answer wasn’t that obvious and it is not something everyone knows. Although he is more of a Ju-Jutsu person, he also has his black belt in Judo and learned a lot through the values this martial art is passing.

The draw and the prize attribution

The conception of a data documents

First, we exported all data coming from the Quiz platform: email addresses, scores, etc.. Everything that would be useful for us in the process, for the draw or for the conception of this article.
Then, we processed some cleaning of all false entries and duplicated participation, as it seemed natural to us that everyone has the same chance to win the jackpot, the JOF Judogi. After a tedious cleaning, we merged all participation from the Quiz (both English and French versions) into a single document, and from here, we could start the final step: the draw and the conception of the article.

The Final Step

As most of you know, we always handle our activities with ethics and values. For this purpose, we wanted to find the best way for the draw to be as close to “true randomness” as possible, the randomness you have just like when you play dice roll or in lottery drawings.

We first thought about using an algorithm, which is something used by a lot of social media contests. While it can be enough for some brands, it did not appear like the best solution for us. The thing is that sequences randomly generated by computers are “pseudo-random”, meaning that they are always based on mathematical algorithms or a precalculated list following some kind of logic that can eventually be “predictable”, as a computer follows a list of instructions and therefore, never generates “true randomness”. This is called PRNGs, standing for Pseudo-Random Number Generators.

After a lot of research, we heard about TRNGs (True Random Number Generator) with the website RANDOM.ORG, offering a service providing number sequences close to real randomness. With this website, came the possibility to generate comprehensive sequences based on atmospheric noise. Several random generation ways are concisely explained in RANDOM.ORG’s dedicated description page (such as randomness based on radioactive sources), but their solution seemed to be the perfect solution to provide equal opportunities to our customers. If you would like deeper explanations on how atmospheric noise randomness works, we strongly recommend that you check out their page.

1. We attributed a number to all participants from 1 to 1608.
2. Then, RANDOM.ORG drew a totally random sequence from 1 to 1608, representing the numbers previously attributed to the participants of the quiz.
3. Finally, we matched the numbers generated by the sequence with the numbers we gave to each participant on our data document and took the first numbers of the sequence to decide the winner of the quiz, the second number was the second winner and so on.

Important to mention: When some participants were not able to claim their prizes on time, we selected the following numbers of this same sequence that we first generated. This way, we ensured to work with the same draw during the whole process.

Conclusion

This first edition of the KuSakuraShop Judo Quiz went far beyond our expectations. With more than 1600 passionate participants, our goal to provide our customers with interesting information through a fun little game on social media is well reached.

After some reflection and self-criticism, as we mentioned above, we underestimated the passion of our community and we have made this first KuSakuraShop Quiz quite too easy. Lessons learned! For the next edition, we will implement some more challenging questions while keeping the content interesting.

As an ending note, this is a project we totally enjoyed building and that has been well appreciated by our community, especially after these few months of lockdown due to the COVID-19 outbreak. A good experience that will result in an even better Quiz next time.