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It's interesting that so many of the model's fail to retrieve this, but any thta do solve it should clearly be able to do so with no reasoning/theory of mind.
Some of the awards are straight up criticism of the research, like for bunk homeopathy stuff. It was awarded for the prank paper used in the Sokal affair, in which it's definitely praise of what Sokal did. Sometimes it is awarded for a bizarre but funny thing from something being studied in another more serious context like the magnetic frog levitation paper.
The part of the wikipedia article you are referencing is an inference from a particular article: "A September 2009 article in The National titled "A noble side to Ig Nobels" says that, although the Ig Nobel Awards are veiled criticism of trivial research, history shows that trivial research sometimes leads to important breakthroughs."
The definition of "blue zones" never had anything to do with average longevity. The entire concept is predicated on unusual numbers of centenarians, not long average life spans. In fact, as is pointed out in the Ig Nobel winning paper, Blue Zone places like Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria have always been paradoxical: they are supposed to have higher numbers of unusually long lived people, but have shorter average lifespans than the rest of their countries. The paradox goes away with the finding that the count of centenarians is incorrect. There's nothing left to the Blue Zone concept without the centenarians.