US contest scoring formula is broken

On Jun 23, 11:56*am, John Cochrane
wrote:
I also dislike the complexity of the scoring formula. But every bit of
this comes from pilot demand!

John:

Respectfully, I have never had the option (that I know of), on a RC
Pilot Poll, of answering Yes/No to the following question: "Would you
prefer a simplified rule system?" Maybe if we started out with that
question, we (as pilots) could determine if we need to continually
micro-engineer the rules to eliminate every perceived inequities.

As I can now with a young child in the house, I am going to get out
there to race when and where I can, get in the start cyclinder with my
fellow competitiors, and then go try and fly as fast as I can within
my limited understanding of the current rules. In this agree
completely with 21.

Do I really understand all, or even most, of the fine nuances of the
current rules... No. Will I live with what the RC gives me to play
with ... Yes. However, management of the rules to eliminate every
single perecived flaw in the rules should not necessarily result in
more complification, year after year.

EY

P.S. - For people who like flying all AT's, really racing your fellow
pilots side-by-side, and understanding a simplifed rule system - get
your local contest organizer to run a Grand Prix Format race! Its a
lot of fun, stays pretty simple and is understandable. Why there has
not been more buy-in from the American soaring community I do not know
- but I do know the fierceness of the opposition to this style of
racing runs very deep here in the States.

An observation from outside the Regionals/Nationals pilot group:
Makes me think of a line in 'The Sun Ship Game', along the lines of:
With something so beautiful, why would anyone bring competition into
it?
Does anyone need the complication of looking up paragraphs, pages,
reams of rules? If glider competition must be this complicated, what's
going to keep people coming back? The STD Nationals entry list should
have been at least double that size. Of course, it's easy to blame all
the usual time/cost/distance things. But there are other factors and
Steve has hit one on the head.
Jim

On Jun 23, 8:32*pm, JS wrote:

Steve has hit one on the head.
Jim

No, I disagree. If you passed your glider written without cheating,
you can understand the rules in a couple hours.

BB is right -- simple formulae gave simple minded results.

Non-rules-fanatics can stop reading here :-).

The existing scoring formulae -- which I don't like, see above -- do
function in an interesting way. What they do is substantially devalue
MATs, provided you make minimum distance and finish. Fly minimum
distance and finish, voila, you get max distance points plus 30. Fly
MD + 1 on an assigned task day, and you're toast. Example here
http://tinyurl.com/n3tg3s . One of the strangest thermal soaring days
I've flown and I read it wrong (I had some distinguished company).
Essentially, I landed out at the finish line, an hour early on a two
hour minimum MAT. But I made 52 miles (Minimum distance in this case
is 50). I gave up only 173 pts to the winner, who flew 2.5x my
distance at decent speed. On the basis of speed and minimum time, I
should have scored about 415 points less than the winner.
Essentially, I received a bonus for getting a finish of some 242
points. You can see what happened to the guys that didn't make MD and
therefore didn't get a finish. Curtains.

-Evan Ludeman / T8

On Jun 24, 7:50*am, T8 wrote:
On Jun 23, 8:32*pm, JS wrote:

Steve has hit one on the head.
Jim

No, I disagree. *If you passed your glider written without cheating,
you can understand the rules in a couple hours.

BB is right -- simple formulae gave simple minded results.

Non-rules-fanatics can stop reading here :-).

The existing scoring formulae -- which I don't like, see above -- do
function in an interesting way. *What they do is substantially devalue
MATs, provided you make minimum distance and finish. *Fly minimum
distance and finish, voila, you get max distance points plus 30. *Fly
MD + 1 on an assigned task day, and you're toast. *Example herehttp://tinyurl.com/n3tg3s. *One of the strangest thermal soaring days
I've flown and I read it wrong (I had some distinguished company).
Essentially, I landed out at the finish line, an hour early on a two
hour minimum MAT. *But I made 52 miles (Minimum distance in this case
is 50). *I gave up only 173 pts to the winner, who flew 2.5x my
distance at decent speed. *On the basis of speed and minimum time, I
should have scored about 415 points less than the winner.
Essentially, I received a bonus for getting a finish of some 242
points. *You can see what happened to the guys that didn't make MD and
therefore didn't get a finish. *Curtains.

-Evan Ludeman / T8

When pilot selected tasks were first done, we had a scoring system
that awarded points partly by distance flown and partly by speed
achieved.
The SadPost as we called it back then was seen as too complicated to
fly and do strategy for, so we moved to the time limited tasks we
have today because they are simpler and easier to understand and
score. The downside is that it is arguable if they as accurately
measure pilot performance on short or marginal days.

None of the current tasking is hard to understand as far as tactics.
Time is not at all critical but, to score well, you need to fly beyond
minimum time. If you come back early, you leave points on the table.
If you have a bad spot, try to fly longer to reduce the affect of the
lost time. That pretty much covers it.

Related to the first message in this string, John Good did a quick
check and the scoring looks correct. It is worth noting that his
comparison of scores relative to current WGC scoring showed that under
WGC scoring, the points compression would have been tighter than ours.
That is the approximately 180 pt spread under US rules would have been
about 120 pt under WGC rules.
FWIW
Good discussion
UH

On Jun 23, 7:35*pm, Tim wrote:

P.S. - For people who like flying all AT's, really racing your fellow
pilots side-by-side, and understanding a simplifed rule system - get
your local contest organizer to run a Grand Prix Format race! Its a
lot of fun, stays pretty simple and is understandable. Why there has
not been more buy-in from the American soaring community I do not know
- but I do know the fierceness of the opposition to this style of
racing runs very deep here in the States.

It seems to me that a Grand Prix format requires identical gliders for
all participants. Where are you going to find 20-50 identical ( or at
least equal handicap ) gliders for all the pilots ?

Now if the SSA were to buy a fleet of (insert favorite super ship
here) and hire college co-eds as crew to drive the fleet from one
contest site to the next, I bet we could have a very active Grand Prix
circuit :-)

Frankly the rules don't really seem that complicated to me, but I am
not trying to analyse them, just fly them. One thing that soaring
should do in my opinion is change the time cycle for rule changes.
Keep the rules constant for 3 or 4 years, then change them. That
would reduce the constant whiplash of new rules every year.

Todd
3S

John Good gave me permission to post his computations

I ( PBW = point behind winner - the most useful way to consider the
results of a contest day):

Pilot US score PBW WGC score PBW
16 790 0 993 0
P7 671 119 932 61
BP 641 149 861 132
7HV 622 168 861 132
2T 622 168 861 132
JP 614 176 861 132
CG 601 189 861 132
1CR 601 189 861 132
4Q 134 656 203 790

Roughly speaking, where the US compresses scores by giving you 600 for
any finish, the WGC gives you 861, and compresess the results even
more.

John Cochrane.

On Jun 24, 8:22*am, John Cochrane
wrote:
John Good gave me permission to post his computations

I ( PBW = point behind winner - the most useful way to consider the
results of a contest day):

Pilot * * *US score * * PBW * * *WGC score * PBW
16 * * * * * *790 * * * * * * *0 * * * * * * *993 * * * * * *0
P7 * * * * * *671 * * * * *119 * * * * * * *932 * * * * * 61
BP * * * * * 641 * * * * * 149 * * * * * * *861 * * * * 132
7HV * * * * 622 * * * * * 168 * * * * * * *861 * * * * 132
2T * * * * * *622 * * * * * 168 * * * * * * *861 * * * * 132
JP * * * * * *614 * * * * * 176 * * * * * * *861 * * * * 132
CG * * * * * 601 * * * * * 189 * * * * * * *861 * * * * 132
1CR * * * * *601 * * * * * 189 * * * * * * 861 * * * * *132
4Q * * * * * 134 * * * * * *656 * * * * * * 203 * * * * *790

Roughly speaking, where the US compresses scores by giving you 600 for
any finish, the WGC gives you 861, and compresess the results even
more.

John Cochrane.

Nice addition BB.

It looks as though the WGC rules give points directly proportional to
speed/winners speed down to 86.1% of the winner's speed and any
finisher slower than that gets exactly the same score. The result is
the scoring system only really serves to sort out the top few pilots
in a contest. Imagine you are anyone besides the top two finishers in
the example above - you have zero opportunity to move up in the
standings because your are in the "dead band" (not to be confused with
the Grateful Dead band). Put another way - if your pilot seeding is
less than 0.791 you will find yourself in this "dead band" nearly half
the time. Not a great way to encourage broad participation in the
sport - unless you like being in a 6-way tie for third place that is
also a 6-way tie for second to last. I vote against taking MDP from
600 to 861 just to emulate WGC. I get the impression that WGC tasking
lands out more pilots than US tasking so they may need the compression
to prevent the overall winner from being the last pilot without a
landout.

Given the choice between complex wording of the rules with simple race
strategies and simply worded rules requiring complex race strategies
(and opportunities for a "high luck" day to swing the outcome of a
whole contest), I'll take the former. I do think there are instances
where we get overly concerned about "corner cases", or pursue more
complex approaches to meeting rules objectives than we might - that is
a constant battle to find the more elegant solution.

I also disagree with the assertion that the current rules confer some
advantage to "rules wonks" who somehow work out winning strategies out
of reading the rules over and over again. I do think a plain English
translation of what the rules mean and what they are trying to
accomplish would be a more interesting and productive read than trying
to back it out of formulas. For instance, I still don't know why MDP
has an additional 30 points added in.

9B

On Jun 24, 1:08*pm, Andy wrote:
For instance, I still don't know why MDP
has an additional 30 points added in.

It doesn't.

It's an 'airfield bonus' fiddled to give a finisher 5 extra points.

Result: "Finisher" who goes minimum distance gets five more points
than the guy who flies 300 miles and lands out at an airport.

-T8

On Jun 23, 6:32*pm, JS wrote:
snip
* Does anyone need the complication of looking up paragraphs, pages,
reams of rules? If glider competition must be this complicated, what's
going to keep people coming back?
snip

I disagree, I however do agree that this may be the sterotype of
competition pilots by non competition pilots.

I am guessing that maybe 80% of the regional compention pilots haven't
actually read the rules since their 1st contest. The basics for
contest flying are 1.2.3.

1. Know how and when to start.
2. Know how fly into the turn points, TAT's and MAT require some
thought but very little understanding of the specific rules.
3. Know how and when to finish.


I know competition pilots that that is all the really know about the
competition rules and all they care to know. They just go fly the
task. One of these pilots often wins our regional contest.

Brian
HP16T N16VP
I

On Jun 23, 10:16*am, Mike the Strike wrote:
snip

We need rules that you can understand and don't need special programs
to figure out. *That's why many of us enjoy participating in OLC -
it's dead simple and you know how it's scored.

Steve's proposal has a lot of merit, but probably has a low chance of
being adopted because of inertia in the system.

snip
Mike

The scoring program is not really any more complicated that what the
OLC does. I would have no problem scoring a contest manually IF (in
big letters) I could calculate the distances easily. To do so we
would have to get rid of the TAT task and any Best Distance Scoring
and go back to the old systems where the distances were fixed for AST
Tasks or at least easily calculatable for MAT task.

I personally liked the fixed distances idea in that it does simpify
the scoring, but the Best Distance Scoring appears to have some safety
benefits to it as well as additional Task options.

On days where everyone finishes in reasonable amounts of time, The
score would be really quite simple to calculate if the distance was
easy to calculate. I think this would probably apply to at least 80
percent of the contest days flown. The other 20% of the days would
invoke some of the exceptions and other score rules that would take
some time to apply but even then it usually would only apply to a few
competitors.

It would be interesting to review some score sheets and see how many
competitors scores were not the simple percentage of fastest
finisher.

As for idea of asking the poll question "Do you think the rules are to
complicated?" this is dumb question in that everyone wants simpler
rules. The much better question is "What one thing would you like to
simplfy or remove from our current rules" This is a much harder
question as John C. has pointed out each rule was put in for a
reason. To the credit of the rules commitee I do think they work hard
to keep the rules as simple as possible, Remember to 15 minute rule?
It is now gone due to popular demand as it complicated the scoring
even more..