Gary, I disagree with your scenaro. there are many
ways to massage this to make it happen not the least
of which would base the landout guy score on time as
well as distance ie if he was faster than the slowest
finisher he would still score less than him. Therefore,
his incentive would be to finish not to landout. You
also assume that there will be a place to land right
off the airport. If the last place to land is 20 miles
away on a 200 mile task it is only 90% or 900 points
in your scenaro. I don't know of any of the racing
pilots I fly with that will settle for that! Assume
another scenaro where the day dies after just one finisher
and all of the pilots are at the last air field and
land there in order thaey all would not score the same
it would or could be based on time around the course
to that point and still less than the finisher. In
this scenaro you could do away with devauleing a day
as well. Anyway its good to have these discussions.
Some changes can be good, some can be bad and the more
we talk about it the better options we can come up
with.

Cliff Hilty Ventus B


At 14:18 27 September 2003, Gary Ittner wrote:

Did you see the movie 'A Beautiful Mind' (Oscar winner
for Best Picture
of 2001)? There's a wonderful scene in which mathematician
John Nash
introduces the concept of the 'Nash equilibrium' to
his fellow grad
students, using the example of how their collective
individual
tendencies to go for the prettiest girl in the bar
will inevitably
result in none of them getting laid that night.

Here's the result I get when I apply the Nash equilibrium
principle to
your scoring scheme: one pilot gets 1000 points and
the rest each get
999 points. Each pilot's individual tendency to go
for the highest score
that he can get will inevitably result in one pilot
finishing and all
other pilots deliberately landing just short of the
finish line.

To most easily see why this is so, imagine an Assigned
Task with all the
pilots starting together in a big furball. Pilot A
is the first, and
therefore the fastest, finisher and gets 1000 points.
As pilot B
approaches the finish, he calculates that his speed
will be 95% of the
winner's speed, earning 950 points. Ah, but if there
is only one
finisher, the fastest finisher is also the slowest
finisher. In that
case, pilot B would get 999 points if he landed just
short of the finish
line, so that is what he does.

If pilot C comes along and finishes with 90% of the
winner's speed,
pilot B would be bumped down to 899 points, so pilot
B would have done
better to finish for 950 points, right? True, but that
assumes that
pilot C would screw himself by finishing for 900 points
when he too
could have landed short for 999 points. And so on,
down the list.

The reason we have scoring systems with a high 'landout
penalty' is
precisely to eliminate these situations in which a
pilot might get fewer
points for finishing than he would get for deliberately
landing short of
the finish line.

Gary Ittner P7
'Have glider, will race'