Jim,
The original poster hasn't responded to clarify his comment.
I suspect most of us, if not all, would agree that when two boats with
different ratings happen to tie on corrected time then there is nothing
wrong with that. I think sailors fundamentally "get" that so there
should be no perception problem in that situation.
However, when two boats that are identical and have the same rating
clearly finish one behind the other then I think sailors would be
"confused" when the results show the two boats tied. As I see it, that
is a "flaw" (or perhaps better - a "shortcoming") of the scoring system
being used (and not in the software).
REAL EXAMPLES
Two boats with TCF ratings of 0.981. The elapsed, corrected without
rounding and corrected with rounding are:
A - 25:52 - 25:22.512 - 25:23
B - 25:53 - 25:23.493 - 25:23
A - 59:12 - 58:04.512 - 58:05
B - 59:13 - 58:05.493 - 58:05
As I said earlier, personally I would add 1 second to Boat B so that
there is no tie as that would be consistent with what sailors expect
and, I think, what they want.
BIGGER ISSUE
Looked at from another perspective, you raise an interesting issue - in
an ideal world, what should the scoring be?
I believe that a statistician (I am NOT one although I started out in
college as a math major) would look at the situation as follows:
We know for a fact that Boats A and B are "equal" and that Boat A beat
Boat B "on the water." If we use only the finish/elapsed times and
calculated corrected times to score we would be throwing away real data
- in other words, we'd be ignoring that Boat A clearly finished ahead of
Boat B. So, a statistician would probably have a problem with scoring
those boats tied as the "scoring system" has ignored relevant data in
the possession of the RC.
The situation is different when the boats had different ratings and did
not finish close to each other. There the only data we have are the
finish/elapsed times and we don't have other data to use. So, in that
situation leaving a tie makes sense because we don't have the additional
data to break it. If we were to not round at all and use corrected times
to say 5 decimal places then we'd be adding information (increments of
seconds) that wasn't in the data collected by the RC. It would amount to
randomly breaking potential ties (which is not per se unfair) so it
might be hard to attack it on fairness grounds though not on some other
rational basis. Deciding who wins races by a lottery is not "unfair" but
we wouldn't accept it as it has no rational relationship to sailing
ability or skill.
I think the bottom line of this discussion is that Sailwave scores
properly and correctly but as scorers we should be reviewing results for
possible anomalies before posting. We need to be aware that ultimately
the scoring should be consistent with what sailors are expecting. Hence,
I'd add 1 second to Boat B in my examples above even though that
technically would not be strictly consistent with the rules of the
scoring system (which presumably assume that we won't randomly change
times from those recorded by the RC).
Art
···
On 12/28/2016 1:34 PM, yho@devboats.co.uk [sailwave] wrote:
Two finishers in the same class are a second apart in finishing.
The leading boat has clearly beaten the next finisher.
To me, (and I must stress I'm speaking personally) there is nothing
clear about it. Handicap racing is primarily against the clock. If
the boats tie on the clock then they have tied. It really doesn't
seem to me logical to do it the other way.
Lets be in a dream world where results are accurately recorded to a
tenth of a second. Two boats of a handicap around 1190 can be 1.1
seconds apart on elapsed, about 0.9 seconds on corrected and still
tie to rounded seconds. Some say that's wrong, and artificially part
them in the ways described above..
But consider, if there are boats with very different handicaps they
could also be 0.9 seconds apart if they were recorded to tenths of a
second. But, because most of us can only record times to the nearest
second (at best), it means that we cannot artificially part boats
that were just as far apart, but on different handicaps.
So this means that just because the two tieing boats happen to have
the same handicap we are splitting them, but if the two boats were of
different handicaps, even though the difference in the actual
corrected times, were we able to measure them, was no less, then we
wouldn't split them. The end result, then, is that by artificially
splitting boats with identical corrected times, we are introducing an
inconsistency in our scoring which can quite reasonably be described
as unfair.
Jim C