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From: dat@thinkage.on.ca (David Adrien Tanguay)
Subject: Re: Idea for Future I-F Competitions
Message-ID: <Dzrws2.JKr@thinkage.on.ca>
Sender: news@thinkage.on.ca
Organization: Thinkage Ltd., Kitchener, Ontario
References: <54ip08$1vd@news.ipass.net> <54j1ch$gpu@wiscnews.wiscnet.net>
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 09:24:01 GMT
Lines: 53
Xref: nntp.gmd.de rec.arts.int-fiction:17621 rec.games.int-fiction:18213

Candace Krepel wrote:
> Joe Barlow (jbarlow@ipass.net) wrote:
> :       Suppose next year, instead of having everyone download and play every
> : single entry, we seperate the games into various " lots"?   For
> : example, say that I am interested in judging next year's entries.  I
> : would simply e-mail Whizzard (or whoever) and request a lot number.
> : He would then write back "You are a judge for Lot #1" (or some other
> : number).  I would then download the games which comprise Lot #1, and
> : the judges for the other lots would do the same.  We would then vote
> : upon the best games in our lot, and the top three games from each lot
> : would then go to the Finals, where everyone could vote on them.
> 
> I think there is merit in Joe's suggestion. Howver, I am not sure Gerry
> (Whizzard) would greet it with the same enthusiasm. He's really done a lot
> already and having him assign people to lots would be terribly
> time-consuming. Because, of course, then he would have to be the police
> officer to ensure that everyone voted only on their respective lot.
> [and other lot problems and suggestions]

Here at Thinkage we have a complicated employee evaluation scheme. The idea
is that everybody rates other employees to determine year-end bonuses.  The
problem is that most people have little or no contact with some others during
the year and are unable to rate them fairly. We came up with a scheme whereby
each person rates a subset of the total, and all votes are combined and
crunched to get an overall rating. The same system would work well here.

The basic idea, greatly simplified, goes something like this: Say there are
three games, A, B, and C. John rates A and B, Susan rates B and C. This means
we know the relative value of A vs. B from John, and the relative value of B
vs. C from Susan. By normalising their votes to centre on B, we get a relative
rating for A vs. C, pegging all three. It gets more complicated when you add
Kelly, who rates A and C. Basically, we take the rating from everybody else to
determine B's rating vs. A and C combined (i.e., the average rating of B from
everybody except Kelly) and normalise Kelly's total contribution accordingly.
Kelly's ratings are then simply averaged into the previous total, giving new
ratings for A and C.

That's pretty hard to follow. Basically, we have a way of taking a set of
partial evaluations and combining them into a complete evaluation. To use it
for the i-f competition, you could do the following. Each voter registers as
a voter. Every voter will evaluate N (e.g., 7) games. The first voter to
register would get games 1-7, the next gets 5-11, and so on. The sequence
would be predetermined to ensure a good coverage, not just the simple sequence
I started here. Note that this can be done with minimal work: the forms are
predetermined, the electoral officer simply assigns the next form (set of
games) to each voter as the officer processes the registrations, noting which
form each voter received.

If it sounds good to Whizzard or whoever's running next year's competition,
contact me.
-- 
David Tanguay       dat@Thinkage.on.ca       http://www.thinkage.on.ca/~dat/
Thinkage, Ltd.           Kitchener, Ontario, Canada          [43.24N 80.29W]
