On Friday, January 20, 2017 at 11:02:01 AM UTC-8, Andy Blackburn wrote:
On Friday, January 20, 2017 at 1:32:10 PM UTC-5, John Cochrane wrote:

US rules had a "drop a day" provision, brilliantly worked out by John Good to overcome the obvious problems.

The brilliance of the design was that it permitted a pilot to select a day to match the winner's score instead of the one (s)he was awarded. This is profoundly different from literally dropping your lowest score because it eliminates the unfairness of dropping devalued days.

Most local racing series have a "best "N" scores" provision. It's odd that no one wanted to try it in a sanctioned contest. It would still be available under waiver - so bring it on!

Andy Blackburn
9B

Im not an expert in scoring, but it seems to me that many of the problems being discussed are due to the scoring system's characteristic of carrying forward the specific history of the contest. This somewhat rare in sports, multi stage bicycle racing is about the only one I can think of offhand. In football (either flavor) you do not carry the previous day's score into today's contest. Nor in baseball, cricket, yacht racing, car racing, or horse racing. It is this characteristic that makes one bad score so devastating. In baseball for example, the Giants might lose to the Dodgers 1-15 one night, but win the next night 1-0. They are even for the series, 1-1. In sailplane racing, the Giants might as well pack up for the series as they would be behind 2-15.

The way to address that is in how contest scores are accumulated. One design yacht racing regattas provide a well tested example. In many regattas (including the Olympics) a "low points" system is used. The winner of a race gets one point, second place two, and so on. A contestant that doesn't finish gets one more point than the last finisher. At the end of the regatta, the yacht with the lowest points wins. A very lucky one day performance does not put you comfortably ahead for the next day - you must win that one too. A very unlucky performance does not put you out of the running. Fast days (where everyone is within a few minutes of each other) does not count less than slow days (where there are large differences in speeds). The currently used time accumulation system is similar to the US electoral college where some states count much more than others and you can win the contest from another while losing to him on a large majority of days. We have seen the results of such a system.

I have retroactively applied this to a couple of regional contests, and it appears to me to give a fairer result. There are not typically wholesale changes, and very few among the top pilots, but better (fairer) results as you go down the list. With SSA scoring, it is quite possible to beat another pilot on 4 of 5 scored days, yet still lose the contest to him. That will not happen in the low points system. Regardless of the type of task flown, placing higher than another pilot in 4 of 5 races should put you ahead of him in my opinion.