Simon,
I'm not sure how much this will help you but we've worked out how
the Officials in the 1956 Melbourne olympics did it and we think we
know why, although some of the details seem a bit odd.
I've uploaded an excel spreadsheet to the files section of the
groups which has the figures from the Australian Yachting Federation
archives. Frankly, it didn't tell us how they can up with exactly
those numbers so, after using some numberical analysis techniques,
we worked out some formulae for the numbers.
Before I give you those, it is worth pointing out the "why" of
this. The High Point scoring system prevalent in those days would
not have indicated the difficulty of getting from 3rd to 1st as
compared as getting from 20th to 18th. Also, if there is a race
with 20 boats, 1st place for that should get more than 1st for a
race of 5 boats. We believe that this system was an attempt to
factor that increasing difficulty in.
They used a logarithmic approach where the points increased more the
higher up the placings you went.
Personally, I reckon someone had too much time on their hands.
Now in 1956, someone would have put this down onto a table like the
Cox-Sprague tables. We calculated it instead.
To work out the points for first place, you use the following
formula:
434.2 * logn(number of competitors) + 101
Then for each of the other places, you calculate according to the
formula:
-434.2 * logn(placing) + (points for 1st place)
When we calculated all these figures out, we noticed that there was
a discrepancy for the Sharpie class for 1st place. This turned out
to be a discrepancy between the "official" records in Sydney and
RMYS's club archives in Melbourne. Since we still have the official
board up in the bar we checked - the Sydney records are wrong.
So, you managed to stir up a fair bit of interest here on that so
thanks very much. I believe there will be an article from RMYS's
historian published in their newsletter soon.
The only thing we can't work out is why use a "magic number" of
434.2? That bit makes absolutely no sense to us.
Mike Gill
Ocean Racing Club of Victoria
www.orcv.org.au
Bit of a side issue and I'm sure Colin won't want to programme up
sailwave to incorporate it but looking at the results of the 1956
olympic results they used a really weird points system. With the
collective brains in this forum, and maybe someone who was alive
then, anyone have any idea how points were awarded in those days???
···
--- In sailwave@yahoogroups.com, "simon smith" <simon@s...> wrote:
Event
Finn Class Country Points
Paul Elvström, DEN 7509
André Nelis, BEL 6254
John Marvin, USA 5953
http://www.sharpie.org.uk/html/1956olympics.html
cheeers and goood sailing
Simon
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