On Thursday, January 19, 2017 at 9:17:09 AM UTC-8, krasw wrote:
torstai 19. tammikuuta 2017 19.10.44 UTC+2 Steve Leonard kirjoitti:
To try and get this going separate from the discussion of the ongoing World Championships,I think we can agree:

Any scoring system will have an unintended consequences.

Current FAI scoring system used at World and Continental Championships tends to encourage group flying (reward for striking out on your own and completing when nobody else does is very small, but the penalty for coming up short is very large). It also does not provide speed point in proportion to the best speed. And it can compress (or expand) scores by having people intentionally land out.

Pilots don't like the idea of being 20 KPH faster than the slowest guy, but still getting the same number of points as him (minimum speed points).

Now, feel free to discuss various scoring system options, and be prepared for people to comment on the "unintended consequences" of that method.

Ready.... Go!

Clipped from Benalla thread:

Ok, let's imagine score formula that gives 900 points to all finishers and remaining 100 points are awarded according to speed. No more gaggles, problems solved?

Wrong. Nothing changes. Same pilots will win and others loose. All we change is point spread between pilots. If winner of the whole competition gets 10000 points and last one 6000, new formula gives 10000 to winner and 9500 to last one. Point spread is very small, but it is as difficult to make any difference by flying as before. Next we start calculating decimals.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

I think where we crossed is the assumption that speed points need to equal max points for the day minus distance points. In that case where you separate the two doesn't matter, but that's not how scoring needs to work. If you allow overlap you can dial up or down the relative disaster of a landout to your heart's content. The price you pay is the point of overlap - dealing with the conflict between very slow finishers and long landouts. You can either set limits to prevent the overlap or not - that is, either allow some ties for the very slow (or extreme nonlinear scoring of speeds below 80% or so to forestall it), or allow some long non-finishers to score higher than very slow finishers.

Devaluation formulae complicate matters further, particularly if they are asymmetric - leading to all kinds of undesirable results and pilot behavior - as was demonstrated at Benalla.

I don't get the obsession with pilots who finish less than 75% of the winners speed. Missing the granularity of scoring 750 points versus some pilot who scored an even lower number when the bigger point is both pilots have likely been knocked way down. I'd rather keep them both more in contention. If we were looking at a situation where much of the field was on a consistent basis hitting the limit, I'd feel differently, but in a system where the points are 1:1 proportional to the speed ratio, that just doesn't happen unless someone really got into trouble - in which case it was more likely bad luck anyway so why score it like it's really a representative score of that pilot's abilities that day.

9B