LogFAQs > #939488407

Hey azuarc. Nice post.

For the record I don't actually think you shouldn't have won, or anything like that. Let's put this way: if you know the contest has the scoring system it has, then you can pick late round upsets as an strategy to win it. That's a viable strategy that reflects skill, and if you took it, you deserve to win. Likewise, taking the more cookie picks in late rounds because you think crazy upsets are going to kill your opponents is equally viable. You beat Jona fair and square.

It's just that this kind of meta is pretty swingy and puts a lot of weight on a small number of decisions, rather than evaluating a higher number of matches. I prefer a competition to be more consistent and evaluate performance across all rounds, not just the finals ones. I think it would be more fun that way.

azuarc posted...

I don't agree with the fix ZTPL proposed, though. Point values should not be, strictly speaking, based on difficulty. Selecting an R4 match should inherently be more difficult than an average R1 match. Sure, there are some 8-9's that might be close in R1, but there's also 2-15 blowouts that are completely trivial. It's also natural that picking the correct champion in the contest is more significant than picking a match at the beginning of the contest. So I do believe incremental scaling is necessary, and I do believe that it ought to be geometric rather than arithmetic. I played with a 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 scale, and while it gets the job done, it doesn't feel satisfying.

I'm not sure if this is relevant, though. The idea of taking the average predictions for each round means I'm considering both the easy blowouts and the debated matches, in every round. Even late rounds have your Link matches that are very easy and award a lot of points, just like early rounds do.

azuarc posted...

If a game scales too slowly (or not at all,) then someone who gets ahead can clinch victory well before the end and have it be anticlimactic. This happens frequently in Jeopardy, even with the possibility to double up at the end. It's also the case in most sports, where the team that's ahead just runs out the clock. However, if a game scales too quickly, as I've often seen in many game shows and home-made trivia contests (like in school,) the ending carries so much weight as to render the rest of the proceedings irrelevant. An extreme case of this is Quidditch, where the golden snitch is worth 150 points, and no team ever scores more than 15 goals in the meanwhile to outweigh the capture of the snitch. Yes, Rowling wrote an exception, just to have there be one, but let's not derail here, please.

This I agree is relevant. Fun factor is the most important thing about these contests, so if we can have the winner undefined even towards the end, I believe we'll all enjoy it more.

And yeah nice Golden Snitch comparison.

azuarc posted...

My hypothesis is that each round should be worth more than the round before, but not twice as much.

As such, the scale factor that I propose is r=1.71 -- which is to say, the cube root of 5. An odd choice, perhaps, but let's look at how the numbers look.

R1 - 1
R2 - 2 (1.7)
R3 - 3 (2.9)
R4 - 5
R5 - 8 (8.5)
R6 - 15 (14.6)
R7 - 25

This is very close to Fibonacci scaling, but the numbers are a little more pleasant than 13 and 21. Under this system, Jona would have won the bracket with me in second, the folks who bombed in the semi would be punished far less, but the contest still has a feeling of ramping up toward an exciting conclusion where the ending does indeed matter.

There is a beautiful elegance to the doubling per round, and so I understand its defense. It also has historical precedent with March Madness and the like. However, if we're truly being interested in "fairness" while maintaining contest excitement levels to the end, I feel like this is the optimal balance.

I like this system.

I'll continue to analyse previous contests, though, to give us a baseline of data to make more comparisons.

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