Item Analysis

This has been long overdue (by which I mean both the thing this post talks about, and this post itself – in the case of the latter, all I can say is “December is busy!”) but I’m glad to get something up, finally, in a basic form at least.

Antony Brown, three times Advent Calendar Challenge Champion, once told me how he had analysed (back in the days when guesses were a free choice and not from a restricted list) likely items by frequency of appearance and when they most often appeared. I have no idea if he, or any other player, still does that kind of analysis but now we all can – it is a new table on the “stats” page!

To develop the table took a little bit of work – firstly I had to a bit of tidying of the historic item data. I had written “Christmas Tree” in four different ways it seems, but I have edited that (in the database at least) to be only one now. This was the case for a few items – I guess there is possibly scope for a whole new “calendar items” database table with unique item codes but that’s for another time. Once that was done (over 2 days during which I lost the progress I’d already made) it was pretty simple to knock together that table that now exists. It’s a bit ugly and the worst example of why table headers at the bottom is terrible, but gets the data across, for now.

Items that are in this year’s calendar are yellow – to get that to show was a bit of a bodge itself and I need to find a more elegant (read: automated, cascading) solution for the future but don’t read too much into it: whilst items already seen will alter the table, items not yet seen do not. Put another way, this database doesn’t in any way know what hasn’t happened yet.

It’s fun to see that the most frequent items have appeared more times that number of years this has been running – because of the fact more than one item can be behind a window sometimes! I want to add more analysis based on this table but for now this is all I’ve got!

See the new table here.

Edit: just noticed a bug. Grr. I’ll fix it tomorrow!