Setup and Rule Diagrams

[angelsfan0055]

I found this game fairly manageable (except for the justify game, but I was on a time crunch and so didn't delve too deep into it) but I was curious about whether the participants in the debate could be on different teams.
That is, for instance, in No. 19 and 20, my diagram had O'Rourke on the Gillom high team and Hilltop High team respectively.
I got both of these questions correct, but almost (and glad I did not) second guess myself because I thought "how can they be on different teams throughout the game?"
Is there anything in the rules that allows for this possibility? Is there anything I should know for games like this going forward?

[Adam Tyson]

how can they be on different teams throughout the game?

If I understand your question, you may be making the assumption that there is one single "true" solution to the game, as if this was taking place in the real world and O would have to be on one team only and that somehow we could find out what that team was. But in Logic Games, that's a bad assumption! ANY solution that follows the rules is an acceptable solution, even if there are multiple acceptable solutions that end up with players on different teams and the teams end up in different positions in the order. Every game has multiple solutions, some as few as three (rarely) or four (only slightly more common), with many having 20 or more possible solutions.

The right question to ask is not "Is there anything in the rules that allows for this possibility?", but rather "is Is there anything in the rules that prohibits this possibility?" Anything that is not prohibited, either by a rule or by an inference based on the rules, is allowed! So if in one situation we find O on Team G without breaking any rules, and in another we find O on Team H also not breaking any rules, then there is no reason not to accept both of those outcomes as possible solutions to the game. Whatever is not prohibited is, by default, allowed!

[yenisey]

it says in the rules that, "Pavlovich’s team places higher than Navarro’s team.

The team from Gillom High places higher than the team from Hilltop High."

How can I know here for sure that higher is to the right and lower is to the left? In some games, we pick the left side as higher numbers/ Like (1, 2, 3, 4, 5,). We put 5 as a higher number. So why do we pick 1 as a higher number in this game?

[Adam Tyson]

When talking about where people or groups "place" in a competition, 1st place is the highest. That's just the way we do things in the real world, right? We would set up this game with a left-to-right base with first place to the left and third place to the right, so the highest place - first place - is to the left. P placing higher than N means that P's team did better in the competition than N's team, and so P must be to the left of N somewhere.

This is different from a game that talks about "a higher number" rather than a higher "place" or "rank." If there was no competition here, just three teams that were called "Team 1," "Team 2," and "Team 3," and they gave us rules about being on a higher numbered or lower numbered team, we would still have the base as 1-2-3 from left to right, but the higher number would be to the right (2 is a higher number than 1, 3 is a higher number than 2). If that was the case in this game, and we had a rule that P was on a higher numbered team than N, we would diagram it with N before P.

Pay careful attention to the difference between "higher number" (to the right) and "higher place" or "higher rank" (to the left).