- Joined
- Jun 21, 2003
I have to say, I never did understand ordinals, they completely confused me,...
Me, too.
The reason that ordinal judging is so tricky is that you cannot do arithmetic with ordinal placements, and hence you cannot subject them to statistical treatment like you can do with regular numbers. (You cannot apply all those formulas that have sigma over the square root of n, for instance. )
Ordinal placements cannot be added together.
1+2=3. Yes.
1st place + 2nd place = 3rd place. No.
You cannot average ordinal placements.
The average of 1 and 2 is 1.5. Yes.
The average of 1st place and 2nd place is one-and-a-halfths place. No.
Also, the ordinals given by each judge are not independent. So you can only compare the entire list of placements given by one judge against another. This is very complicated when there are more than two judges.
If fact, there are only two mathematical operations that you can do with ordinals. You can count them. This leads to the "majority of ordinals" system. You count up how many first place ordinals someone has. If a skater has a majority of first place ordinals, that skater wins. If no one has a majority of first place ordinals, then you count up the number of first and second place ordinals together for each skater, and so on.
The other thing you can do with ordinals is compare them. Fourth place is worse than third. If you do this for each judge and each skater one by one you get the "OBO" method. Both methods are open to strange anomalies like "flip-flops." This occurs when two skaters who have already competed have their ordinals suddenly reversed when some third skater beats yet a fourth skater, both of whom are below the original two. There is no ordinal system that can avoid flip-flops (and have a certain set of other desirable features) except in the case of a dictatorship (only one judge).
The CoP avoids all that (making it less interesting, IMHO )
And as for the actual scores, it was fun to see if the judges scores matched what you thought they'd get, but it was all pretty predictable and almost funny since when I'd think someone would get 5.7, low and behold, most of the scores were 5.7's.
Yeah, I agree, that was fun. That was fun.
gkelly said:Or if you're used to sports like speedskating where total points (times) from a first race carry over to the second race, so that it makes no difference who wins the second race, just whether they beat the "time to beat"
It's no coincidence that some of the specifics touted in the change of scoring system were championed by a speed skater.
That is interesting, because on television broadcast now they do exactly that. When the skater is in the Kiss and Cry for his marks the announcers say, "He needs 102.34 points in the LP to move into first place overall. And here are his marks! Oh, only 100.99 -- he's into second."
That's actually pretty cool.