Shawn is getting ready for his wedding, so I guess I'll step up to bat. Obviously, starting at 2pm was a far-from-ideal solution. The origin of this problem, of course, was trying to pack too much into one day; religious factors prevented either event from occuring on Sunday, while the Family Feud Bowl wasn't cancelled until a week before the fact, giving insufficient time to move either event back to Friday. I know that my own voice was hoarse from reading packets 10am to midnight. The distribution, geek-weak as it was, was an offshoot of Mason's admirable, fulfilled goal of writing 15 packets by themselves. A team has to write its strengths; admittedly, this lead to the hiccup of 1/1 per packet on computer science. Possibly it could be said that CP2 was overdistributed; the distribution called for no less than 2/2 each baseball/football/basketball and a total of 12/12 hockey spread over 24 packets. As was pointed out, the packets were absolutely consistent -- we were very careful to make sure that the packets were of even strength and equal distribution throughout the tournament. Obviously, over 15 rounds between a small list of question writers, regularity is going to crop up. The scoring system was designed such that a team could not abuse the sink to unfairly be rewarded for lack of knowledge depth, and worked roughly thus: fraction of games won was squared and added to (team's total points divided by greatest total points) squared; that number was compared to a theoretical ideal constant. The goal of each game, therefore, was not merely to win by any means necessary, as Mike Burger asserts, but to win while scoring as many points as possible. This was decided by the whole of the organizing staff to be a more worthy test than sheer ability to win. Further notes on CP2 will be forthcoming, probably later this afternoon. Edmund
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:43 AM EST EST