Last March, when I went to Las Vegas for the very first time, I made sure to pack pens and paper. I knew we would need the supplies. We converged from various points on the US map: six of us, a guys’ weekend in Sin City. On Friday afternoon, we dawdled in the Hard Rock hotel, waiting with impatience for the action to begin. Dusk fell, the neon rose, and we gathered in the lobby. Together we walked through the maze of slot machines and blackjack tables, past the bar and the steakhouse, past the flyers for burlesque revues and up into the nightclub.

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And there, having spurned the vices of Vegas, we indulged our own, clustered around our team’s answer sheet as a quizmaster barked questions at us. The weekend, Geek Bowl XIII, had been put together as a blowout for quiz fiends who attended bar trivia nights across the US and still yearned for more. Friday was a warm-up quiz: calisthenics before the big game. On Saturday, 240 teams spent the evening packed into a Hard Rock auditorium, sweating their brains over 65 questions. You could buy beer and snacks while you quizzed, but no one seemed particularly keen on alcohol. You drink to forget; you quiz to remember. The only Elvis impersonators I saw that weekend were part of a special round in the quiz, in which Vegas street-theatre performers staged cryptic re-enactments of famous movie scenes. (We had to identify the movies.) Another round had questions to which the answers all included types of cheese: Alison Brie, Goat, Grand Coulee Dam. In a third, we had to construct portmanteau phrases from images of snacks and celebrities. NutElla Fitzgerald. OvalTina Turner. Desmond TuTuna Helper. No quiz I’ve ever attended has provoked this much pained groaning at the answers.

Which is saying something, because I’m entering my fourth decade of addiction. In my quizzing, there is to be found a story of my life. It is the single constant to which I’ve clung as I bounced between schools, universities, jobs and cities. In India, where I grew up, my obsession began with inter-school quizzes: teams of two or three, sitting behind desks, fielding questions in turn. When I was eight, I took part in my first, in Delhi. We missed out on winning on a tie-breaker, and for a week afterwards, I replayed that moment in my mind so vividly that I found it hard to fall asleep at night. In 1999, when I went to an American university to study journalism, I discovered Quiz Bowl tournaments, for which we practised once a week, dividing up into teams and holding mock-contests in empty classrooms late into the night. I returned to India and, while working as a reporter, sank into the circuit of “open” quizzes, so-called because anyone is free to form a team and take part. Three years ago, after my wife and I moved for a brief stint to Ireland, I joined the Dublin Quiz League, conducted in pubs but otherwise a serious affair with difficult questions.

Everywhere I have lived, I have attempted the World Quizzing Championship – an exam-like solo affair held all over the world on a particular June day. Last year, nearly 3,000 people took part. Its 240 questions, to be answered in two hours, are set by a tight group of enthusiasts who run the International Quizzing Association. For much of the year, I begin my days with a dose of six questions emailed to me and thousands of other subscribers of Learned League – an online quiz that solicits new players only through referrals from existing ones, divides us all into small brackets, and pits us against each other. (This morning, bound as ever by honour to refrain from Googling, I answered questions on shibboleths, umami, Assassin’s Creed and Indian princely states, but blundered on Dora the Explorer and surf guitar.) During holidays with friends who are fellow addicts, we’ve sought out pub quizzes: light fixes when we were craving the hard stuff. I wish I could say that we thought of them as dips into the local pub culture of Colombo, or Madrid, or Seattle, or Edinburgh, but we really went just for the questions. Whatever I’m doing at any point of the day, it is probably safe to assume that I would rather be quizzing.

We ended up not doing very well in Vegas; 100 teams and 25 points separated us from the winner of the $13,000 top prize. It was a reminder of how my quizzing has not only defined my life but has, in turn, been defined by it. Even in our age, when practically all the information in the world is available on our phones, what you know best is often a product of where you have been. In my team were five men who had grown up in India. The sixth, the lone American, had to bear the burden of recalling Tuna Helper, Yoo-Hoo and other snacks from his childhood; he was also the one we turned to when we needed to know the number of Canadian teams in the National Hockey League or the name of the country singer Tammy Wynette’s husband. We felt like a basketball team playing with our shoelaces tied together.

That we got many answers right nonetheless was the result of a remarkable shift in quizzing culture over the past two decades – another way in which quizzing has closely tracked my life. I started quizzing when I had the sticky memory of a teenager; my mind held facts without effort and yielded them instantly. Back in the 90s, quizzing demanded this quality above all else. As I got older, my mind shed some of its retentive powers. But quizzing, too, has changed; its questions have come to privilege not just memory but also breadth, deduction and lateral thinking. This new shape was a response to the rise of the internet, and it called upon a truer, more natural form of our relationship with knowledge – of what it means to know the answer to a question.

There isn’t even a word for us, really. Quiz players? Trivia fanatics? I prefer quizzers. But when I use that to describe myself to a civilian – to a non-quizzer – the inevitable inquiry follows: “What does that mean?” For that question, ironically, there is no easy answer.

The problem is not that no one knows what a quiz is. Quite the contrary, in fact; the problem is that nearly everyone has quizzed, or has at least seen a quiz, at some point in their lives. They have caught clips of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Or they have played a multiple-choice Friends trivia game online. Or they have been set a general knowledge quiz in school. Or they have learned to avoid the local pub on Tuesdays, when it hosts Trivia Night; in 2013, The Publican, a trade magazine, found that 23,000 out of the UK’s 60,000-odd pubs have at least one quiz a week.

Everyone knows how a quiz works: a question asked, an answer ventured, a binary verdict of correct or incorrect handed down, next question please. They suspect that quizzing depends upon an ability to soak up facts: capitals of US states, currencies of countries, names of authors, Academy award winners. Where they flounder is in imagining how something this commonplace can turn into a passion, into a marker of identity. A quizzer? It’s like describing yourself as a doodler or a shower-singer.

The most visible quizzes, the ones on TV, are also those that least graze the lives of quizzers. I have been on the Indian edition of Mastermind, and I have friends who have appeared on Only Connect, Jeopardy! and Millionaire. But these were one-offs. The selection process is competitive, and there are too few shows to sustain the ardent quizzer. The most frequent, hardcore quizzing always happens under the radar, attended by the few dozen regulars in each city who never stop wondering why their tribe isn’t larger. For the Dublin Quiz League, we borrowed corner tables in pubs on slow weeknights: a quizmaster and two teams at each table, questions murmured out of earshot of the patrons sipping Guinness at the bar. In universities, Quiz Bowl tournaments requisition classrooms. In Bangalore, quizzes take place in a seminar hall rented from the Institution of Agricultural Technologists during holidays, when there isn’t an agricultural technologist for miles around. So many quizzes happen on Sundays that a passerby peeping into one of these rooms anywhere in the world might take in the hushed conferrals and the gnostic atmosphere and believe that a Christian cult’s prayer meeting is in session.

In such quizzes, the material rewards are scanty, often non-existent. You compete for pride, and even that can only be enjoyed within the small, cramped confines of this subculture. The more pathetic the prize, it would seem, the greater the sincere quizzer’s dedication. In Amsterdam, where I once happened to be on holiday on the day of the World Quizzing Championship, I came an all-Netherlands third and won a Jabra Bluetooth earpiece. It is my most sophisticated piece of quiz loot ever. I still haven’t figured out how to sync it with my phone.

When I was a member of the Pennsylvania State University Quiz Bowl Club, we would pool our money to rent a car, drive across two or three states and stay in a cheap motel near another university that was hosting a tournament. We would lug along “the Judge” – a buzzer set built into a briefcase, with protruding red and green lights, looking for all the world like a B-movie bomb. (If you brought along your own buzzer, you got $5 or $10 knocked off your registration fee.) All weekend, our squad of four played half-hour University Challenge-style games against other teams, buzzing individually on 10-point questions and conferring on 30-point bonuses. The scorelines often ran tight, but the real drama was private, internal: the mortification at buzzing wrongly on a question your teammate surely knew; the glee at encountering a question your team had come across in practice only the previous week. Nominally, the tournament produced a champion: the team that had won the most games, and that often received just a kitschy trophy for its labours. Come Sunday evening, we would pack up the Judge, hop back into the car, and reach our dorms close to midnight. Sometimes, we would read questions to each other on the way home.

In India too, the most intense quizzing events occupy all of a weekend. Quiz festivals, we call them, as if we’re recognising them as rituals in the calendar of some deviant paganism. If you pass through the written preliminary round into the eight-team final, you will encounter some of the most elaborate quizzes on the planet; one film quiz I attend every June plays almost 100 minutes of video, short snatches patiently clipped and reclipped to offer a clue or reveal an answer. Across seven or eight quizzes over three days, a quizzer might face as many as 600 questions. By Sunday evening, you feel as if someone has been punching you in the head; you also feel deeply sorry that the weekend is over.

To attend these contests, quizzers rearrange the furniture of their lives, budgeting their time away from their families, or ensuring that they don’t travel overseas for work during a quiz weekend. I know one quizzer who switched jobs because his city’s quiz scene wasn’t active enough; I know another who scheduled his wedding to avoid a clash with a quiz. Once, while we were waiting around for a popular annual quiz to begin, a friend remarked that his wife was heavily pregnant; he hoped she wouldn’t go into labour over the next few hours. That would be unfortunate, we agreed.

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“No, you don’t understand,” he said. “If my daughter’s born today, that means she’ll have a birthday party on this date every year. Which means I can never come to this quiz again.”

Admitting to such a fevered love isn’t a good look, I realise. The very premise of quizzing can appear to be a fetishising of book learning: of facts memorised for their own sake, instead of being learned from any true engagement with life. At best, this can feel charmingly antique in the 21st century, when the internet and its infinite electronic lobes do our remembering for us. At worst, quizzers are thought to suck up facts only to win meaningless contests that cater to their intellectual vanities; they are typecast as people who have such a transactional relationship with knowledge that they really can be said to know very little at all.

But at its finest, quizzing today is never about shallow recall; it’s an exercise in nimble thinking, and possibly the only forum where the entirety of your life – everything you’ve ever seen, read, tasted, heard, heard of, or lived through – can be marshalled as pure knowledge. A friend of mine, an English professor in a college in Bangalore, once called quizzing an act of bricolage – a term that the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss used to describe how even a small number of ideas may be mixed and combined to create something novel and unforeseen. The process thrives on freshness and play, and it holds a sense of limitless possibility – of producing many, many things we never knew out of the few things we do know.

The deconstruction of a question is one of quizzing’s high pleasures. Here’s one that I set for a quiz a few years ago. The root word is the proto-Indo-European bhel. Out of this springs a host of related words (in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese) and also an English word. Strangely, the English word is precisely the opposite of the others. The reason, it has been surmised, has to do with fire, bhel. The words of the Romance languages refer to the brightness of fire, but the English word refers to its final remains. What words are we talking about?

The question is designed for teamwork and deductive leaps, not for quick familiarity with proto-Indo-European etymologies. The brightness of fire and its final remains evoke two images: the white heat of flame and the char left behind. They are opposites, most evidently, by virtue of their colours. If the English word describing the char is “black”, then the Romance counterparts must be translations of “white”: blanca, blanc, bianca, branca, all words that might very conceivably have derived from bhel.

It’s a difficult question, but I love it for its feat of bricolage – for how it does so much with so little. The foreknowledge potentially required to answer it is minimal: really, just the word for “white” in any one of a number of European languages. You don’t need to speak fluent French or Spanish to have come across terms like carte blanche” or Casablanca, and the merest curiosity about their literal meanings will have yielded all that you require.

But with this single key, such a rich universe is unlocked: the evolution of language, and its elemental roots; the beautiful, contradictory union of black and blanc: everyday words which, at the slightest inquisitive tug, divulge their history. The answer is satisfying even if you don’t solve it. It has what University Challenge’s question-setters call “inherent interest”, and what Indian quizzers call “funda”, short for fundamental: an easy appeal for anyone, and a burst of joy at encountering an unsuspected elegance in the world.

When I was 15 or 16, in 1997, we got our first internet connection at home, and I discovered Quiznet, a mailing list full of junkies like me. You could set a quiz and send it out; people wrote to you with their attempts over the subsequent week, and then you released their scores and the correct answers. In my first Quiznet quiz, which included seven questions on cocktails, I asked: “Which cocktail, made of bourbon, sugar and mint, is associated with the Kentucky Derby?” Answer: the mint julep. I had read about the Kentucky Derby in a book; I’ve forgotten its title, but the mint julep has stuck.

This standard model of quizzing – short, stiff questions, to which you either knew the answer or you didn’t – had been around in India for decades. Its progenitor, in quizzing lore, was a Calcutta man named Neil O’Brien who had spent time in England, grown fond of its pub quizzes and taken the concept back with him. Even when he conducted his first quiz, at a parish hall in 1967, quizzing was a relatively young pursuit, in comparison to the life spans of other pastimes. The Romans did not quiz. Neither did the Aztecs. We have no evidence of quizzing in Mughal India or Ming China. It didn’t feature among the parlour games of the 19th century. The Victorians preferred charades or squeak piggy squeak, a variation of blind man’s bluff – perhaps understandably, because at the time, to ask questions about distant countries or art or literature would have presumed an implausible breadth of access to texts and education.

The first quizzes emerged, naturally, in schools, where students could be tested on a shared body of knowledge. King William’s College, on the Isle of Man, has wrung answers out of its pupils in an annual quiz that began in 1905. In 1934, the year O’Brien was born, the quiz’s categories included bishops, coinage and literary queens, and its questions already wore the garb of the cryptic-crossword clue for which it later became famous. “Who balked who of his fame ‘with a worm’?” If you didn’t recall that phrase from the 288-line Tennyson poem A Dream of Fair Women, you had only the slenderest hope of responding correctly with Cleopatra and Caesar. This was not a quiz for lackadaisical readers.

In the US, the military tested basic knowledge as part of its Alpha examination of recruits. (A 1921 multiple-choice form asked: “The Penguin is a: Bird, Reptile, Insect.” No intimacies with Tennyson were required.) But for a while, as Alan Connor recounts in his book The Joy of Quiz, the purpose of this pursuit remained foggy, if intriguing. The two authors of Ask Me Another!, a compendium of questions published in 1928, thought it a fine idea to quiz celebrities and record their performances, but they were often met with confusion. “I didn’t quite understand just what it was he wanted to do to me,” the humourist Robert Benchley wrote after being approached by one of the authors. The book sold well, but it didn’t seem to spread the love very far. Why would anyone wish to commit such arcane details to memory, reviewers wondered. “A man who treasures up a piece of information like the height of the Brooklyn Bridge has a screw loose somewhere,” the New York World decided.

By the time the second world war ended, though, the culture shifted, and quizzing came to be appreciated as entertainment, not imposition. The knowledge “bees” on British radio inspired quizzes in pubs and youth clubs. On US television, shows such as Twenty-One and The $64,000 Question drew rapt audiences. In 1953, US universities also started to compete in a radio programme called College Quiz Bowl; it moved to TV as College Bowl and provided the template for University Challenge in Britain, which first aired on ITV in 1962.

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The questions in Quiz Bowl, College Bowl’s direct descendant, are thickly academic. When I first quizzed at university, I needed a few months to calibrate myself – to get used to dredging answers not out of my recreational reading but out of my textbooks and classroom lectures. But I came to relish the density of the toss-ups – the starter questions, as they are called on University Challenge – and how they unwrap themselves in orderly fashion. A question starts with the most opaque clues: “A wreath of flowers sent to this politician’s funeral is the origin for the name of the Primrose League.” More facts follow; midway, perhaps at “He controversially took a loan from Lionel de Rothschild”, there is just enough light and enough material to buzz in with a guess. Certainly at the transparent end – “Name this Conservative prime minister of Jewish descent, the rival of William Gladstone” – we know the answer is Benjamin Disraeli.

The delight lies in how certain facts may be obscure to some and immediately clear to others, or how even the same information may be held and organised in different ways by different minds. Once, at a tournament, I buzzed after three words – “President Cheddi Jagan” – and, in wild surmise that the question would ask for a country, ventured: “Guyana”.

I was right, but there was no reason for me to have known that – except that, years ago, I’d seen Jagan in a cheesy Unesco advertisement that played throughout the breaks of an India-West Indies cricket broadcast. He appeared above his name and title, offering such a cheesy thumbs-up that I’ve never forgotten him. In the same game, I came up empty while trying to remember the name of the Deccan Plateau – the triangular chunk of southern India, where I lived for much of my childhood. There is nothing to be done about the caprices of memory – but somehow, that makes quizzing more exciting, not less. And it sweetens the sudden, climactic illumination: the microsecond when the brain, acting almost outside your will, pulls the clues together to recognise the answer, as cleanly as if you had known it all along. The quest for that moment is the source of the addiction.

There are so many different formats of quizzing that no one can be described as the world’s best quizzer. But Pat Gibson can certainly stake a claim. He’s won the World Quizzing Championship four times. In 2004, he won a phlegmatic million on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?; in 2006, he won Brain of Britain, the BBC Radio 4 quiz. Today his diet involves three quiz leagues in which his team takes part. “Serious quizzing,” Gibson said approvingly, describing the leagues to me when we met in November. Additionally, five or six weeks a year, he takes the train from Wigan, where he lives, to Glasgow, to appear as an Egghead on the BBC show of that name. The format often requires a challenger to take Gibson on solo. You have to feel for the challenger.

Gibson, 58, didn’t properly start quizzing until he was in his early 30s. Growing up in Ireland, he devoured atlases and maps, but he only ever went to one major quiz: the Brain of Ireland, where, as a teenager, he got stage fright and didn’t say a word. After moving to England, he worked as a software engineer, and in the 90s, a colleague roped him into a quiz league. He got so good that, a decade later, he decided to do it more seriously.

Gibson has built himself software into which he keys facts that he comes across; on some days, he will add as many as 100 facts to his database, culled from books, TV or his perusal of The Times over breakfast. If he is driving and he hears something compelling on the radio, he will pull over and scribble it down in the notebook he always carries with him. He sets time aside for revision. He may decide, next week, that it’s been too long since he brushed up on the Vietnam war, so he will call up the file and study it. He has built files on all sorts of subjects. Sometimes he wonders if he could acquire an appreciation of, say, Ibsen’s plays purely via his Ibsen file, without watching or reading any of the plays themselves.

Frequently, Gibson talks about questions as if he were Genghis Khan surveying central Asia: “All those individual little fortresses, each one begging to be conquered,” he says, practically licking his lips in anticipation. People often assume that his only weapon is his tenacious memory. “Well, yes, remembering is obviously important,” he says, “but it isn’t decisive.” Even after mastering a database, there is no way to know every possible question-answer pair cold; nearly always, a quizzer is making a reasoned guess, even when they are certain that their answer is correct. What Gibson values far more than memory is his capacity to submerge himself in a topic. “If you answered a question about Alexander the Great, it’s because you were interested in Alexander the Great, and you read about Alexander the Great,” he said. “Curiosity – there’s a big payoff for curiosity.”

Within the philosophy of quizzing, it isn’t easy to define what precisely makes a fact worth retaining. It has to have the ring of novelty, or the tilt of oddity, or the gloss of some human achievement; it has to sit at an angle to all the rest of the information that continually laps at our feet. “The number of eggs produced every year in Cambridgeshire – that isn’t interesting to a quizzer,” Gibson says. Unless the number is zero, it isn’t distinctive; other counties produce eggs, too, and the statistic says nothing intriguing about Cambridgeshire. On the other hand, on the morning of the day we met, Gibson had prospected a nugget out of the newspaper: that the actor Eddie Marsan has situs inversus, a condition in which the positions of major internal organs are flipped into the opposite side of the body. That only seemed to beguile Gibson into further inquiry. How common is situs inversus? How does the human frame handle this inversion? Who else has situs inversus? The fact went straight into Gibson’s database.

Every quizzer practises some such form of information triage. (On my phone, a Notes file is dedicated to gobbets of fact that I’ve come across and want to pursue. The latest entry: “The names of hydrogen and oxygen – Greek for ‘water-former’ and ‘acid-former’ respectively – should actually be reversed. It’s hydrogen that forms acids and oxygen that forms water.”) This habit can make quizzing out to be a kind of intellectual escapism – a constant flight from the big, boring everyday into the eccentric or the significant. But it is, in fact, the opposite. Quizzing invites us to pay extra attention, not only to what we read or watch but also to what is around us.

For all its flaws, Slumdog Millionaire got that part about quizzing right. In the movie, Jamal Malik, a young man from Mumbai’s slums, goes on a hot streak on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, prompting suspicion in everyone. How would a kid like this, with his narrow, limited existence, know the statesman whose portrait appears on a $100 bill or the city in which Cambridge Circus lies? But he had been tipped $100 by an American tourist while working as a phoney tour guide at the Taj Mahal, and he had served tea in a call centre where the clusters of cubicles and their aisles were named after British cities and their streets. That’s how he knew.

In less dramatic, Oscar-winning ways, that has happened to every quizzer: an answer pried out of some ancient circumstance, like Cheddi Jagan from a Unesco advertisement. In psychology, episodic memory is distinguished from semantic memory. The first recollects autobiographical events – past birthdays, a first kiss, a car accident – while the second stores facts, like names of cities or Ballon d’Or winners or chemical element symbols. In our minds, during a quiz, these categories don’t feel nearly as separate; every slice of episodic memory seems to be embedded with facts that we can pick out, like plums in a pie. During one of his Mastermind runs, Gibson got a question about the USS Pueblo, a spy ship once captured by North Korea. “It was like a Proustian moment,” he said. “In a flash, I was back to being a boy, sitting on the floor of our house in Letterkenny, reading a Reader’s Digest article on the Pueblo.” Even our most secondhand knowledge is tied intimately to our first-hand experiences. If you stay alert and inquisitive, the best preparation for quizzing can be life itself.

My time in quizzing has overlapped tidily with the web’s renovation of the sport. Mainly, its effect has been to vastly expand the realm of subjects that might feature in quiz questions. In the US, the more academic style of Quiz Bowl was supplemented in the late 1990s by Trash tournaments, which quizzed students on video games, comic books, pop music and decidedly non-classic TV and cinema. The web held reservoirs of detail about these topics that made it possible to frame sound questions about them; in an earlier era, setting a Trash question pack by relying on the library would have been a punishing task.

European quizzes grew more capacious as well. “I’ve looked in old quiz books, and the questions are dreadful, frankly,” Jack Waley-Cohen, one of the question editors for the BBC show Only Connect, told me. “There was an assumption that everybody knew the same things.” Now, quizmasters don’t ever ask who the chancellor of the exchequer was in 1973, he said. “For one, someone who is an expert in television or music has an opportunity to demonstrate it, because there are questions on that. But also, the questions I like don’t test absolute knowledge. They test lateral thinking, and your ability to access knowledge.”

The greatest internet-driven transformation has occurred in Indian quizzing, where questions have bloomed into intricate puzzles, strewing clues through wordplay, snippets of video, clips of audio, and photos. My morsel about the mint julep would never make the cut today: it’s too dry, too plain. Questions are longer and denser now, and devised to be unlocked in multiple ways, as in the blanc-black case. Logic and teamwork are indispensable. In these quizzes, one may even lavish the compliment “Good answer!” – not for the right response, mind, but for a guess that makes inventive use of the facts provided. The creativity of this style of quizzing, I’m convinced, is also a reaction to the stodginess that infects Indian education. Studying in India involves scant imagination and heavy doses of rote learning; examinations admit no such notion as a “good answer”, merely correct and incorrect ones. Just as the internet offered its bottomless resources to those with wide, various interests, quizzing became a canvas to express these interests.

In theory, the web ought to have democratised participation and success as well. “Anyone can look anything up now, so the only investment is curiosity,” Gibson told me. “There’s no reason that someone from [the isolated Micronesian island] Nauru can’t be the next World Quizzing Championship winner.” Of this, I’m not so sure. The hierarchies that order knowledge everywhere else are present in quizzing as well. A Nauruan quizzer will encounter fewer questions about centuries of Micronesian art than about the horse’s head in Picasso’s Guernica. New Western-centric canons bound into place alongside old ones – Game of Thrones cheek by jowl with the old Greek tragedies. But perhaps we are in the middle of a slow improvement, a gradual rearrangement of these hierarchies; certainly quizzes today represent the world much better than they did 20 or 30 years ago.

The more perplexing issue is that of gender. The subculture tends to be overwhelmingly male – a problem that has been visible wherever I have quizzed, from Ireland to India. Local patterns of sexism might account for some of it. But the universality of this imbalance suggests that the old, male domination of systems of knowledge – even informal ones – is still solid and immovable, like a boulder across a road. As a result, quizzing lays itself open to the accusation that it doesn’t try hard enough to be inclusive, and that it is content largely to be a space into which men can escape to hang out with other men – like poker nights, but for nerds who happen to know why a two-pair of black eights and aces is called a Dead Man’s Hand. (When Wild Bill Hickok, the American frontiersman, was shot in the head during a poker game in a South Dakota saloon in 1876, these were supposedly the cards he held.) For all the quick intelligence that quizzing demands, it can also be slow and witless in avoiding the worst traits of the culture it inhabits.

This is unfortunate, because quizzing really is, in principle, among the most equitable of sports. A well-set quiz will not cater exclusively to any inborn prowess. Instead, by being wide-ranging and original, it takes as its premise a powerful truth: no one knows everything, and everyone in the room knows something that the others don’t. Each fresh question is played on a newly levelled field, offering the distinct possibility that the newcomer may beat the veteran to the answer. The guy on the couch never watches Ben Stokes get bowled in a Test match with the certainty that he could have done better. But he might well watch an Oxford team on University Challenge fumble an answer that he knows and be sure that, within that pocket of erudition, he has proven a winner.

These individual triumphs can come about because no two lives experience the world in identical ways. There is something beautifully human about that, just as there is something beautifully human about the very act of remembering – especially now, when we are fast ceding our intelligence to our machines. We don’t always need to remember facts any more, given that we can look them up or store them; more and more, we relieve our minds of this duty. But that’s precisely why, in a quiz, it’s gratifying to excavate answers from our memories, as if to prove to ourselves that we are still capable of it. And it feels pure and liberating that this is knowledge stripped of any practical purpose. It has lodged in our neurons not because it has been programmed in to serve a function, as with computers, but because the human brain is an insatiable, indiscriminating sponge.

For the moment, too, it appears as if we have this caper of the intellect just to ourselves. The machines are already defeating us at chess and Go, solving mathematical problems, and identifying fake works of art. But as of now, they can only hoard deep reserves of facts, producing one of them when queried specifically for it. They only know what they can store; they don’t yet have a way to go from not knowing to knowing, the way we do so unconsciously in quizzing. It is true that, in 2013, an IBM supercomputer named Watson trounced two former champions on US quiz show Jeopardy! But it turned out to be a perverse badge of pride for our species that IBM spent billions of dollars on the machine, deployed it in a quiz show where buzzer reflexes matter as much as answers, and had to discard its brute, fact-crunching approach for an algorithm that sifted hypotheses, appraised language, processed allusions, and made associations. Thinking like a human, it turned out, is still something that humans do better than machines.

No other quizzing computers have come forth since. Which isn’t to say that they won’t ever; in fact, we may turn into such devices ourselves, if we elect to install the kind of brain-machine interfaces that Elon Musk and others want to develop. I suppose this will be like having a Google search bar in each of our heads, the cursor blinking, ready to ransack every viable bank of information. Maybe the power to know absolutely everything will result in some elevated, as yet unimaginable form of quizzing, but I have my doubts. Quizzing depends too much on not knowing. I don’t mean this in the hard-nosed, free-market sense that only deficits of knowledge can determine winners and losers, or as airy solace that our limitations make us beautiful. I mean that the purpose of quizzing is to discover the answers, to work with meagreness, to build sufficiency out of insufficiency. It is to fashion your own lamp and guide yourself to the truth that black and blanc are shoots with the same root. In this manner, the world comes slowly into focus, question by question.

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