Hope you are all following along with this summer’s Big Internet Math Off contest at the Aperiodical. Last year’s was fun, and with a new, more complex format, this year’s is even funner!! Christian Lawson-Perfect has taken last year’s experiment to a new level... which seems to be running with amazingly few glitches!
Great also to get introduced to several expositors I was totally unfamiliar with. In fact, I’ve been blown away a bit by the quality of the presentations — it’s one thing to be able to find/pick out interesting nuggets of mathiness, it’s quite another to present them to a large-scale audience in both an effective visual and expository form; so far, many great examples. A little disappointing that there haven’t been more votes cast in several of the matchups, but no doubt a lot more folks are reading/enjoying these posts than are voting (I myself have sometimes been tempted not to vote, because it is so hard choosing!). The tournament is only about halfway over, so plenty more to look forward to. And so long as no one bribes Matt Parker (last year's runner-up) to sway his 85,000 Twitter followers to vote as a block I think all will be kosher... ;)
Anyway, once the contest is over it might be interesting for someone (I don’t have time) to look at many possible factors in the match-up results. It would be nice to believe that votes are based on nothing more than objective judgment of the quality of the posts, but of course there's much subjectivity involved and no telling what else enters into the equation:
1) Is there a difference/advantage to being a first or second presenter in the matchups?
2) How about more algebraic versus more geometrical presentations, or more visual or video-based presentations versus more textual? or, simply long versus short entries?
3) Does day-of-the-week have any consistent effect on the voting, especially weekends versus weekdays (or the July 4th holiday)?
4) Any pattern in the results of gender (male vs. female) match-ups? or, how about Brits vs. non-Brits?
5) Would there be any advantage to having the posts be anonymous, simply labelled "Entrant A," "Entrant B," "Entrant C," etc. (could anonymity even be maintained through a multi-week contest)?
6) And of course it would be great to know which astrological signs fared best in the contest? ;))
5) Would there be any advantage to having the posts be anonymous, simply labelled "Entrant A," "Entrant B," "Entrant C," etc. (could anonymity even be maintained through a multi-week contest)?
6) And of course it would be great to know which astrological signs fared best in the contest? ;))
You can likely think of other factors to play with too…
The sample size from the contest is too small for any such analysis to mean much, but still might be interesting.
And I’m not certain myself exactly how the scoring is being done to determine the semi-finalists/finalists; that may raise other questions as well.
The mathematical jousting continues almost daily through the end of the month when a winner is crowned. Good luck to all!
4 comments:
There's no hope of keeping all contestants anonymous when so many include videos showing themselves.
DOH!... of course, good point!
Yep, anonymity just won't work.
Some very good questions. I have some ideas about what kinds of pitches do best, after two years. Wouldn't be right for me to say, though 😉
It depends on your sense of humor but I enjoyed Matt's shenanigans last year and MENACE in particular was an inspiration during the year (even if it really was mscroggs's project :) )
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