c4countdown

Gavin Chipper

Thanks for drawing attention to this game Charlie, you are a legend, as is Beth Sutton. May I also draw attention to the fact that she had five words disallowed in this game and still won, which must surely be a unique achievement. I may put this on the Wiki some day! But doesn't this show that it ...

Gavin Chipper

I'll just say to anyone who thinks it's 5/9 . . . What would your answer be if all nine were taller than him, or when he'd only met one person? David I would say that his best estimate based on the available data would be that there is a 9/9 chance the next person is taller than him. With, of cours...

Gavin Chipper

Michael Wallace wrote:I quite like cheese, but can't really stand things that smell cheesy (yes, I'm an odd sort, don't even get me started on cheese *flavoured* things...)

Really? And what does Gromit have to say on the matter?

Gavin Chipper

M. George Quinn wrote:No, but it's an it.

And the tail of it would be its tail (unlike the way I described the Earth's axis). But then if you named it "it"...

Gavin Chipper

jimbentley wrote:I'd probably drop dead mid-stroke if I tried it now.

Most people would probably drown if they went swimming while having a stroke.

Gavin Chipper

Paul Howe wrote:Oh right, sorry for the misunderstanding. I still don't think what you've written is completely right though, as for one thing it implies the probabilities will converge to a multiple of 1/11.

Shouldn't they then?

Gavin Chipper

Joseph Bolas wrote:Howard has explained how to work it out step by step, but I think because theres quite a bit of bruce force required to solve this, most have decided not too. I think it was harder than I implied .

But what is the answer?

Gavin Chipper

Did anyone watch Horizon this evening? They had this chap on it who reckons that there is evidence of "precognition". His name was Dean Radin, which immediately made me suspicious that it was a joke as it is an anagram of Randi (as in James Randi). Then they had these fighter pilots on, on...

Gavin Chipper

I was invited to a ghost weekend or something for someone's 30th birthday once but it cost too much money - presumably to do with the magic ghost-detecting equipment.

Gavin Chipper

M. George Quinn wrote:"It's"
That one confuses me. If your cat is neutered can you say "it's tail"?

Only if it is tail. Is it?

Gavin Chipper

If there Earth didn't rotate at all around it's axis then I just had to quote Gevin-Gavin and correct him - you mean "its" not "it's" don't you! And why "there" and not "the"? :) "there" instead of "the" is less embarrassing than the other...

Gavin Chipper

Did we get an answer to this?

Gavin Chipper

Yes, there are definitely more top players around now than in the past. But having said that, there's still only relatively few players that I'd back to beat Harvey Freeman at his peak.

Gavin Chipper

2. The top contestants nowadays are just better. Maybe better prepared, but definitely better. 3. The average contestants, I believe, are worse. I was thinking about this, and the average contestants getting worse could be down to having Countdown on all year. I don't know if the same numbers apply...

Gavin Chipper

David Williams wrote:I agree that a score of 100 is the equivalent of 60 in the old days. They are mathematically pretty much equivalent, they are both nice round numbers, and you need to score consistently to reach them.

Yeah, yeah, just because it would elevate you.

Gavin Chipper

Craig Beevers wrote:But I'm sure there are more important things to worry about.

No! Never!

Gavin Chipper

The letters and numbers are visible on a small monitor embedded into the set, so it isn't vital to write them down. I must admit that I've often solved the easiest games before the 30 seconds have started. But with harder games it can help to wrote them down. Oh are you just talking about for conte...

Gavin Chipper

1. Has anyone else noticed that at some point in the past (I can't remember when) the normally unobscured numbers started becoming obscured by Carol's head when she puts the rest of them up? How and why did this happen? I'm sure it never used to happen, so something must have changed. 2. Does anyone...

Gavin Chipper

Only just noticed this. I agree that a score of 100 is the equivalent of 60 in the old days. They are mathematically pretty much equivalent, they are both nice round numbers, and you need to score consistently to reach them. So why are there so many more 800s than 480s? 1. Luck. You can get away wi...

Gavin Chipper

Mike (who eagerly awaits the return of the comparatives of polysyllabic adjectives debate!). Is this not a more clear-cut matter? Only allowable when listed, right? Of course then you have words like FRAIL and REAL that everyone considers to be one syllable, but when you really think about it, are ...

Gavin Chipper

There can only be a limited number of these mass nouns, so surely it would even be possible for the Countdown team to give a definitive list of pluralisable ones. Failing that, either allow or disallow them all, with a possible exception for the ones that would have irregular plurals. Either disallo...

Gavin Chipper

Julian wrote:I don't want this to turn into a Gevin-style rant

Gevin-style rant indeed. Just stae your case, and let others react to it how they like.

Gavin Chipper

So yes I think exceptional female contestants are going to be even rarer now than they were before, sadly... there was one lady in the 9-round era who got an octochamp total of 500+, Lucy Roberts - 500 points then being roughly equivalent to 900 points now 504 was a pretty good total, but nothing l...

Gavin Chipper

Natascha Kearsey is is the only female CofC winner, and while all her scores were pretty average, she did seem to up her game when she beat Scott Mearns. Also first game loser Linda Dawe racked up an impressive 126 against Melanie Beaumont in a special. I wonder if she would have carried that on giv...

Gavin Chipper

This is a brilliant read. Keep it going.

Gavin Chipper

Yes, that about sums it up, although methinks you may have seen this before ;) Well, it's one of the many things that have interested me ever since I came across a young Patrick Moore, some years before he started his Sky at Night TV prog. He's been doing that for 50 years! When was this?! Presumab...

Gavin Chipper

OK, well according to Craig's logic the answer is probably 366. But I still wouldn't count the Earth's orbit around the Sun as an extra rotation. Pedantically speaking, yes, but surely it has no actual relation to reality. Also, the question asked, 'How many times does the Earth rotate around its o...

Gavin Chipper

So it might be worth while if anyone (Mike Brown) has access to round scores in old games, to have a look at the average player ratio from one format to the other, and then one big assumption later, compare the top players that way. This would be a waste of time actually. Just look at average score...

Gavin Chipper

I sense quite a long Gevin post is on the cards... Yeah, why not? A few of us did work out a round by round conversion for some players - 6:11 on the letters, 2:3 on the numbers and 1:1 on the conundrum, and while the overall ration for each player was different each time, it seemed to work out at ...

Gavin Chipper

I would say that Allan Saldanha is a bit like Jimmy White. Brilliant player, he featured a lot, getting into finals, but never got that ultimate prize.

Gavin Chipper

I'm not sure how true this is. Mostly the numbers is about applying the same techniques over and over. Once you get those pinned down it's all down to being mentally quick enough to explore several possibilities in the thirty seconds and to a certain extent being lucky enough to try the right appro...

Gavin Chipper

This wasn't really in evidence in my own CofC, where I thought everybody played at pretty much the same level as they had before... since then there's been a spate of contestants who've been motivated and dedicated enough to do loads of practice following their initial run, and managed to raise the...

Gavin Chipper

But at the very top level - CofC, or finals week of a strong series - you definitely need that numbers ability as well, so it's still an important part of the game Gevin, not a "novelty" at all. Also remember the number of 15-round-era contestants for whom the numbers were the main part o...

Gavin Chipper

Letters is certainly a more important part of the game than numbers but I wouldn't go as far as to call it a novelty, I've seen plenty of contestants who are above average in the letters game but end up losing because they lost 20, 30 points on the numbers. But it can only happen in some games. No-...

Gavin Chipper

I think it's fair to say that most contestants and, more importantly, most people playing along at home prefer the letters rounds, so anything which decreased them would be fairly unpopular. I might be wrong about that. Let's have a poll. Maybe but reducing from 11 to 10 isn't much, whereas numbers...

Gavin Chipper

I don't know why people are knocking Conor. I don't think they have been really. To be honest though I think a lot hinges on one or two games. Had Conor taken the crucial conundrum against Paul Gallen and gone on to win the tournament, I think he would probably win a greatest poll. Mark Tournoff is...

Gavin Chipper

Gevin - nice to see you posting and yourself too Julian. What you doing these days?? Hello Tom! You probably did notice that I included you as one of the best non-champions. Maybe it would be interesting to see a mini tournament! Regarding Chris and Conor - it's interesting how heavily Conor beat C...

Gavin Chipper

I think Jono's octochamp run proves that if you can nail your opponent on the numbers then you can afford to make shit up in about half of the letters rounds and still win comfortably. But joking aside, if you are the champion you only choose once, and it's very likely that the other two games will...

Gavin Chipper

I used it because Soo has got all the percentage of maximum scores for Ocotchamps on his website. Although I see no reason why it is a particularly bad statisitc to use, as opposed to just an averagely bad one (in that they're all bad). Care to explain? Well, player A gets the maximum in every lett...

Gavin Chipper

Basically, the point being that if an infinite number of random Johns performed the same task, picking the comparison people at random, 6/11 of them (of the ones that were 5-4 up) would find that they were taller than the next person. Or if it doesn't make sense to talk about infinite, the proporti...

Gavin Chipper

Charlie - re another Supreme Championship - Damian has firmly knocked that idea on the head, he said there definitely won't be another one on his watch. Though I bitterly argued with him at the time, I've come to realize that he was right - if there were another one, the vast majority of the contes...

Gavin Chipper

I feel compelled to point out that 6/11 is merely a decent guess at the probability, and not the actual probability, which we couldn't possibly know from the information given. I'm not particularly bothered, just wanted to pick holes in someone else's puzzle. And because it would effect the answer ...

Gavin Chipper

Kirk Bevins wrote:I don't get this problem. Surely if he is say 190cm, then there are infinitely many heights below this and infinitely above this so the probability is 1/2 or 1 - but these are both wrong. I don't really understand your question.

It's just based purely on the comparisons he's already made.

Gavin Chipper

Hmm. 6/11? I'm not too sure, and I can a potential flaw with what I've done, but it's the best I've got. What's your reasoning for this? Call john J, and anyone else X. You can write it out as |X|X|X|X|X|J|X|X|X|X| | is where the next person must go (since there can't be two people with the same he...

Gavin Chipper

Again I may as well state the obvious. Is it 10? I can't see any way of determining any other answer with the data we're given. Nope. I would've thought 9, given that he's the tenth person and each person gets on independently of all the others. But maybe I need to think about this more carefully. ...

Gavin Chipper

Ben Pugh wrote:1/2?

Nope.

Joseph Bolas wrote:This may sound weird but is there a 100% chance (so 1/1) that the next guy is shorter than he is?

Nope!

Gavin Chipper

I have worked this out, and the figure does seem wrong, but I will post what I got anyway (on the very very slim chance I may be right :lol:): Out of the 1024 possible combinations, only 512 can end with a short person. There are a total of 126 combinations out of the remaining 512, where there are...

Gavin Chipper

Conor wrote:Hmm. 6/11?
I'm not too sure, and I can a potential flaw with what I've done, but it's the best I've got.

What's your reasoning for this?

Gavin Chipper

If you were to take all the possibilits of 10 people regardless of height then it should be 1024? Then if you take all the combinations out of those 1024 where there are 6-small & 4 large (first 9 in any order, the 10th being short) then that number, over 1024, simplified (if possible), should ...

Gavin Chipper

dinos_the_chemist wrote:This seems too obvious so is probably wrong but I may as well go ahead and say it. 5/9?

Nope.

Gavin Chipper

Ah, it's me isn't it? It's that one isn't it, where you say "you're driving a bus", and then do all that other crazy shit, and then ask the driver's name, and you're supposed to be all like "wtf?!!1 the driver's name? but what about all the people getting on and off and that??!!"...

Gavin Chipper

John has no idea how tall he is relative to other people, so he decides to compare his height with some. After nine random comparisons, he is taller than five and shorter than four. Assuming that no two people are exactly the same height, what is the probability that he will be taller than the next ...

Gavin Chipper

Every day there is a bus that travels from A to B, taking people who live at A to B. Each day, each resident of A has an equal chance of getting on the bus, and their chance of getting the bus is completely independent of anyone else. There are also thousands of residents of A, so by getting on the ...

Gavin Chipper

That's all somewhat pointless really. There's no point comparing live rounds, 'crucial' conundrums and other high pressure situtations with my games where I won comfortably because they're completely different. Yeah, alright. But it's the best comparison I could think of at the time. Most statistic...

Gavin Chipper

What about the rule on getting two zeros (say 4-4 and 5-5) and dividing them by each other and declaring the answer to be the total you are after?

Gavin Chipper

The intermediate results do have to be integers, though, which would be difficult to check otherwise. WTP calculated that this does actually make a few games impossible which would otherwise be possible, which is interesting. But in some cases it would be obvious that it always remains an integer, ...

Gavin Chipper

Regarding Beevers v Gallen - looking at the Countdown Corral, Craig scored 92.1% of the possible in his Octochamp run and Paul 83.8%. Obviously this doesn't count as Paul Gallen's greatness is based on the premise that he improved massively for the CofC. So looking at those four games: 125/141 118/1...

Gavin Chipper

That still rewards plodders over flair players. My system? I don't see why really. Obviously the plodders are being rewarded in the particular rounds where the flair players have their words disallowed, but that's how it should be. I can't see any other way. However, the scoring system that we use ...

Gavin Chipper

One last post for now - if this is about par, then if in your games you get a lot of easy distributions, you might always get the best word (say it's an 8) but there might be lots of 8s, so it might be par so you don't get anywhere. One way of doing it might be to have the letters games given a rank...

Gavin Chipper

So you're saying that giving them 4 or 5 less than they had is preferable to giving them 1 or 2 more? Hmmmmm. Well, the point is that we don't know what they got. But the ranking score for number of letter doesn't have to be linear. As an example, you could have a scoring system where the ranking s...

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