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Gordon was using the program in the few matches we played with him. I guess we Alpha tested it today and he made it sound like he was within less than 5 hours of having it ready to be Betad. Which I honest-to-God-Shammgodd thought it was, but i've since found it still misbehaves in ways I was prett...

I'll beg for an invite. [email protected]

Doink the Clown wrote:

The Friar wrote:disappointed not to know about this before.

ACF Fall
Right: Ezra Pound
Wrong: Marco Polo

What was this off of?

Italy italy italy italy ... italy italy I don't know maybe this guy wrote poetry or something? italy italy italy buzz fascist oh noes fascist?

disappointed not to know about this before.

ACF Fall
Right: Ezra Pound
Wrong: Marco Polo

The point is that it is much more possible for you to be able to learn about opera, social sciences, or philosophy without taking classes on it. That is barely in the same ballpark as computer science, unless you are extremely geared towards that subject already and are willing to read textbooks (w...

I also want to reverse the standard complaint from moderators after tournaments: this set was remarkably well copy-edited. [...] So good on ya for that. I found it noticeably better on that front than, say, EFT. Even where there were issues, they were the transparent kind that I could proceed throu...

This set contained what I think was a relatively high concentration of grammatical and (less troublesomely) spelling errors, which made moderating a challenge and which, I assume, may be attributed to the intense effort to finish it on time, but the content was overall pleasing, if slightly less per...

using Bayesian methods instead of likelihood estimates (which, as I understand, is what logistic regression actually does) Logistic regression is a probability model that you can estimate using any number of tactics. I'm saying quite simply that the conversion rate is the objective difficulty of th...

Arsenoff (2009) has already created a logistic model of team ability. References: Arsenoff, Gordon. 2009. "FRIAR: An Exact Model for Ranking Quizbowl Teams using Question-Level Results." Paper presented to hsquizbowl.org forums in response to S-Value Revision call for proposals (http://www...

Cool, Jerry! Thanks.

BTW, to diminish the extent to which I come off as rude to Seth -- "If you have read this far" is directed at everyone, because I wrote a whole lot; I clearly already had Seth's attention and am grateful.

Thanks for the feedback, Seth! There is quite a lot to chew on here. it's not clear to me that there is actually that much difference between the quality of FRIAR's r -value and the quality of simpler measures like tossup points per tossup heard or bonus conversion My explication has allowed there t...

You are right that I reported the wrong correlation. Assuming I did it right, the Spearman for the 2009 non-Penn data is actually 0.65, less than the reported R^2 in all circumstances. A Pearson for winning pct. vs ASV got up to 0.81 but I'm not sure that will hold for other years. That actually re...

I went ahead and tried to do this Wow! Thanks, man. and the MLE is rather ugly. I didn't suspect it would be elegant. In practice, likelihood functions of non-trivial models rarely are. Still, apply the Newton-Raphson algorithm and the computer will solve it in no time flat compared to the length o...

A caveat regarding FRIAR that I don't think I brought out in the paper and a note on its performance, both of which I forgot in the last post. First, although, as I note, no ranking system can get rid of all opportunities for gaming it, and it will be necessary for NAQT to reserve the right to revie...

Dwight, thanks very much for the comments! If I may be so callous, I'll take them out of order. It is demonstrated that team ability can be estimated from both tossup and bonus statistics, but nowhere is it claimed which one is used or how these estimates are combined. The r-values in the probabilit...

Competitors in this model may not experience changes in ability relative to each other as question difficulty varies. In general, I find that this isn't usually true; that said, it's an enormously helpful simplifying assumption, it's not hugely far from the truth, and I guess that since SCT questio...

First of all, sorry to be somewhat late to this party. I've been working on the proposal below since about 10:30 Tuesday morning. That said, I wish to propose a rather new approach: using the outcomes of individual questions as data points, rather than the outcomes of games or rate statistics aggreg...