JWGC USA update

On Saturday, December 12, 2015 at 3:51:28 PM UTC+3, wrote:
This is one of the absurdities of the IGC scoring rules: Sometimes you can gain a lot of points by waiting in front of the finish line. Day 11 in the standard class was such a day, and has cost the Polish team a medal.

If the 3 in front (2 Poles, 1 Brit) had colluded, en waited 21!!! minutes to cross the finish line, and finished all 3 with a speed of 122.82kph (instead of the real 138.14kph), this would have resulted in the following:

- T0 would have become larger than 3 hours, leading to a 1000pt day instead of a 932point day.

- n2 (returners with speed larger than 66,7% of best speed) would have increased from 3 to 12. Thus the speed points would have increased from 72 to 308 points.

- The result is, that the first 3 would have scored all 1000 points, and number 4 would have had 711 points. This is a 289point lead, instead of the real achieved 72point lead.

- For all others behind 4th place, the results would even have been worse..

- In the total final ranking of the JWGC15, Siodloczek would have become 2nd (instead of 4th in reality), Flis would have become 4th (instead of 6th), and Matt Davis, would have become 7th (instead of 10th).


I understand the reasoning behind the rules: a "lucky" outlier (such as in this case) should not have an unreasonable impact on the final competition results.

However, the implementation is totally wrong: it should never be possible to gain points (or better: increase your pointspread against the rest), by flying slower.

I have seen this happen a couple of times in the past, but never with such a substantial impact as in this case.






On Friday, 11 December 2015 15:59:53 UTC+1, Steve Leonard wrote:
On Friday, December 11, 2015 at 8:41:10 AM UTC-6, Dan Daly wrote:

That's the way the international rules are (if enough people make minimum distance to have a day). One reason to fly real IGC rules for Club Class - there are no rule-based surprises.

Yet, in the Standard Class, with more completions, the day is devalued. Also interesting that to be 50 KPH slower than the guy ahead of you only cost you 70 points on this day with 50% landouts. I would only consider that to be a "no rule-based surprise" if you fully understand that the rules are not even close to anything linear to comparing your daily performance to the best performance that day.

But, this is digressing into which set of scoring formulas you prefer.

Go Boyd! Go JP! Go Daniel! Fly safe, and fly fast!

Steve Leonard

It's easy enough to ensure this, by using continuous (or at least piecewise continuous) functions in the rules, rather than step functions.

But then you have to have someone mathematically competent on the rules committee.

There are certainly a few such here (e.g. JC), but maybe not in IGC.