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#11
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KS don't need no steenking rules tweaks -- he's been doing fine for a coon's
age. Bob Johnson "Bill Feldbaumer" wrote in message m... On the second day of this year's 15 Meter Nationals, Karl Striedieck chose the best direction for his flight and smoked the rest of the field. He made 63.7 mph, 8 mph better than the second pilot and 14 mph better than the third. Did he get 1000 points for this outstanding performance? No, he received only 852 points. The reason was that some other pilots chose less favorable directions for their flights and landed out. That devalued the day and Karl's score. The more poorly Karl's competitors did, the lower his score became. Karl should have stood by the finish line and urged his competitors to come home so that he could have received a better score! In racing sports world wide, an individual's score is determined by his performance alone. Soaring is the only racing sport that allows an individual's score to be affected by the performances of his competitors. It should not be this way. It can be changed. It is possible to make a rational analysis of scoring systems rather than just accepting "the way things have always been done." Any one interesting in doing so could start with my posting on r.a.s., 10/2/2003, "History of Contest Scoring." Bill Feldbaumer 09 |
#12
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Bill,
the scoring system is goofy, and we keep trying to rejigger it, with greater or lesser success. But one thing is a constant... the best pilots keep winning. Why is that? When I figure it out, I'll be sure not to tell anyone else. |
#13
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besides KS has been head of the rules
committee for many years and has had ample opportunity to tweak the rules |
#14
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There is logic in this rule, anyhow: 1 Soaring is dependent on the weather. 2 For a contest task (not the same as a leisure cross-country flight) to be fair, it has to give more or less the same opportunities to all contestants, so the weather should be "sufficiently" homogenous and dependable, or else it's no longer a matter of skill but luck. 3 As it is next to impossible to assess the weather objectively in the whole contest area, some kind of objective criterion is needed. 4 The best way the rule makers found until now was by taking into account the effective results of the contestants, hence: the less they perform, the less the day was predictable, the bigger the luck factor, the less the day is valued. I agree it doesn't seem fair at times, but on average, it's not that bad a rule. Anyhow, it's a rule that was made for international contests. There is nothing that prohibits the organizers of smaller competitions to amend it. You can drop the day factor, drop the minimum distance, drop the minimum number of contestants having to cover the minimum distance, add a rule saying that if even only one contestant flies the task, it will be valid regardless of other limitations... Of course, you have to check with your national competition body if this makes the competition acceptable for them to be recognized - but then again, if it's a competition just for fun, it doesn't need to be sanctioned. -- stephanevdv ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Posted via OziPilots Online [ http://www.OziPilotsOnline.com.au ] - A website for Australian Pilots regardless of when, why, or what they fly - |
#15
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There is a logic behind devalued days - unappealing
as it seems on first inspection. The intention is to keep the standard deviation in scores (the 'spread' in points) relatively consistent over the course of a contest. Devalued days essentially reduce the landout penalty if lots of pilots land out. Why? Because the belief is that if a few pilots do really well and a lot do poorly, there was likely something odd in the weather conditions for the day or the way the task was called to increase the 'luck factor' for that day. While this may not always be true, it tends to correlate pretty well in my experience. Without devalued days one pilot might end up with an insurmoutable lead early in the contest - hundreds of points, perhaps 1000 in the extreme scenarios mentioned here. The all (s)he would have to do is leech on the next best pilot(s) for the rest of the contest - not much fun. And no way to pick a champion in my view. At least with devalued days a less skilled pilot would have to put together a string of exceptional performances, rather than just one - lucky or not. It's fine to argue about the merits of every day counting the same - but in the real world there are enough unusual circumstances that competition pilots on the whole have elected to deal with it this way. I know Bill has an alternative that has been used in Canada, I think. It ensures that no two days count the same, but deals with landouts in a different way and has some other pluses and minuses, some of which are safety related. It was debated here several months ago. 9B At 18:06 05 June 2004, Chris Ocallaghan wrote: Bill, the scoring system is goofy, and we keep trying to rejigger it, with greater or lesser success. But one thing is a constant... the best pilots keep winning. Why is that? When I figure it out, I'll be sure not to tell anyone else. |
#16
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At 15:48 07 June 2004, Andy Blackburn wrote:
There is a logic behind devalued days - unappealing as it seems on first inspection. WRONG, wrong, wrong....there is no logic AT ALL behind devalued days. Yes, there can be luck and unusual weather conditions that skew the results so that less skilled, luckier pilots win one day. The solution is to hold not one race, but several races over several days......AND that is what each contest does!! Just like the World Series, or the Stanley Cup (Game 7 tonight!), a series of races will even out the luck factor and let the skilled pilots go to the front due to consistently out-flying the lucky pilots. I would say if the better pilots can not win more races in a week long contest than the 'lucky' pilots, the perhaps the better pilots are really not that good after all. All this devaluing of days is just political correctness that reduces competition victory so the loser does not feel so bad. |
#17
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At 16:24 07 June 2004, John Jones wrote:
At 15:48 07 June 2004, Andy Blackburn wrote: WRONG, wrong, wrong....there is no logic AT ALL behind devalued days. I guess a monkey typed out that rule when no one was looking. ;-) Just because you don't agree with the logic doesn't mean there isn't any logic at all. By the way, different sports do treat individual competitions differently. Many team sports (baseball, football, basketball, hockey) generally count one game equal to one point - the most games won decides the outcome of a series. Other sports count cumulative score differential (golf) and some (F1 racing)attribute non-equal points to finish order (1st gets 10 pts, second gets 8 pts, etc) - irrespective of how much you won by. So, winning two games in the hockey playoffs by 10-0 scores is not the same as winning the first two rounds of a golf tournament by 10 strokes is not the same as winning two F1 races by 10 laps - only in the second case does cumulative score differential matter and only in the second and third can you never win an individual round/race and still win the tournament/series (though even here there is a huge difference in how you would have to do it). There are also round-robin and seeding based tournaments, not to mention the college football BCS system (yikes!). I forget how they score bowling... There are things about the day devaluation rules that are strange and seemingly arbitrary, to be sure, but lets not pretend that they aren't addressing a real issue with how contests transpire -- and please let's not pretend that other sports don't have similar peculiarities that come out of they way they are played. Take baseball's infield fly rule. Now THAT should generate some heat! 9B |
#18
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Gentlemen,
Thanks for your responses. A number of issues were raised. However, many of you did not address the question that I asked. Should a pilot's score be determined by his performance alone or should the performances of his competitors be able to influence his score? If you are still interested, please answer that question. I don't know what my soaring experience has to do with your logical evaluation of a scoring system. However, some of you asked. Over the past forty-two years, I have flown sailplanes for over 3300 hours. I have competed in ten nationals and numerous regionals. I have had several articles on scoring systems for soaring published. You can trace through them with the reference in my original posting, "History of Contest Scoring." Bill Feldbaumer 09 |
#19
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Bill Feldbaumer wrote:
Gentlemen, Thanks for your responses. A number of issues were raised. However, many of you did not address the question that I asked. Should a pilot's score be determined by his performance alone or should the performances of his competitors be able to influence his score? If you are still interested, please answer that question. I've flown under both kinds of systems, and I prefer the "determined by his performance alone" for the rule simplicity, but I prefer the "the performances of his competitors be able to influence his score" for the greater fairness I think it supplies. -- Change "netto" to "net" to email me directly Eric Greenwell Washington State USA |
#20
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