I think this is my favorite CV post so far. Thanks for brightening my day.

More interesting is that, to a physicist’s level of accuracy, the power laws fall into three categories: running events (~2), jumping events (~3/2) and throwing events (~1).

This is screaming out for a Theory of Decathlon Unification.

@jmchez – it might be easier, but it wouldn’t be fairer. They’d probably based the power on the expected variability between high class athletes for that event – to make the total range of scores available for the 100m about the same as that for the javelin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decathlon_scoring_tables

“Beginning in 1920, the IAAF considered, at least, the following criteria for a legitimate decathlon scoring table:[2] (1) The table should reflect the fact that, at higher levels of performance, a unit gain (such as a decrement of 0.01 second in sprint times) is more significant than at lower levels of performance, because of the physiological limitations of the human body. (2) The scores for different events should be comparable, in a manner such that equal skill levels in different events (however difficult it is to define such a concept) are rewarded with equal point levels.”

Some great commentary on Olympic scoring.

What I would like to know is how Gymnastics can justify five significant digits (a score like 16.025) that are based on human judges giving out scores to two significant digits (a score like 9.1)?

Haha. Hacking into the “flaws” of the decathlon formula!

Does it ever bother you that you can’t say A < B in complex numbers?

Further thought : I am surprised that the gaussian didn’t show up anywhere in their calculation of scores.

I’m a decent athlete, but a lightweight who hadn’t thrown a shotput since the 8-pounders in jr. high. I competed in an intramural track meet in college and thought I’d do a full decathlon (which I actually did quite well in) sans pole vault. But when it came down to the full-weight shotput, I wasn’t prepared for how heavy it would be and actually threw a negative distance (inside the circle)! If they were doing proper decathlon scoring, I think I would have broken the system.

Oops! That should be:
$latex a(x – x0)|x – x0|^{(beta-1)}$

Given the scoring for women’s gymnastics this year, I would suggest that the use of imaginary numbers is far from a theoretical construct.

e.

LOL, and an idea is born.
Here i am, an irreverent, maybe jaded 200m runner who will, realistically probably finish last ( since someone has to ) and it’s my last Olympic appearance or maybe the best scenario is i have a slight injury which guarantees this loss, whatever. So, no medals, no sweet lucrative sponsorship deals with Nike after the olympics etc. So what can i do to salvage something from the situation ?

Run the race in s u p e r s l o w m o t i o n !

The uproar over such a publicity stunt would be considerable and certainly no small amount of ireverence and courage would be needed since these athletes are representing their countries and all so, this is why an injury basis is the ideal (perhaps ONLY ) “justification” for such a stunt. Nevertheless, if sponsorships and historical notoriety have a real world and legitimate role or value in the Olympic universe then i think such a stunt could succeed admirably.

Clever, but the simplest solution is probably to throw an (implicit?) step/Heaviside function in there.

Although the conditional with an absolute value mentioned above makes perfect sense, too.

Maybe the solution would be to hand imaginary medals to the athletes with the greatest imaginary comaponents in their total scores.

lol, gem of a post

I’ve said many times to anyone who will listen: when you are dealing with stuff where negative numbers don’t make sense, take a log. In the case of the decathalon, we would be talking about a weighted geometrical average. Makes far more sense.

@ jmchez (post #2)

“Wouldn’t it just be easier to compare the athlete’s performance as a fraction of the world record for that event?”

In addition to the comments presented earlier in this thread (the point system should be non-linear because it becomes harder and harder to improve your result when you get better and better), there is also the almost trivial fact that world records tend to evolve in time. What happens if the world record of 100m sprint improves while the decathlon competition is still going on? Will the points from the 100m run in the decathlon race change accordingly? What happens to the old decathlon results when the world records improve later on? How can you meaningfully compare results from different decathlon competitions (necessary if one wants to talk about the world record of decathlon) if the way athletes are rewarded points has changed?

In my opinion, those issues make it impossible to base the decathlon point system to the world records of the individual events.

I score this post at 1337. That was fantastic. Thank you for making me laugh. I have always thought that any event that needs a judge shouldn’t be an event, but it looks like every event needs a mathematical jury now.

What do you mean that there aren’t any Americans who are competitive in the decathlon? Brian Clay is the reigning World Champion (and if you know anything about track and field, you know that the athletes respect World Champions as much as Olympic Champions). Here’s his resume:
2005 World Outdoor champion; 2008 World Indoor champion; 2008 Olympic Trials champion; 3-time USA Outdoor champion (’04, ’05, ‘08); 2004 Olympic silver medalist; Two-time World Indoor silver medalist (’04, ’06); 2000 NAIA champion; two-time NAIA LJ champion … not to mention that Chris Huffins (recently retired) and Tom Pappas (2003 World Champion) ….

Thank you, but I think I’ll stick with theBucky Katt point system.

Hello… I tried to manually pingback to this entry, but it did not work, so I’ll have to go with the “poor man’s trackback” (need to do this at several bloggers’ entries – among other to-dos – being stuck here in St. Paul, too drained to blog, this might be a good time for that).

Trackback from Not going to take it anymore, University Blog

- Also, for the Numb3rs-minded, you might want to check out this post, from a new weblog I just found out about (having been out-of-the-loop again, for awhile), via the Ecosystem. (I wonder where my weblog has fallen to, in that ranking.)