Category: statistics

Couple of housekeeping measures before I begin – late last night I made a change that has no bearing over the actual results or standings of the competition but that I wanted to make for a while – where everything else is equal (score, number of correct guesses, highest scoring best guess etc) the current standings table now ranks players in the order they joined the competition this year. Previously it used a random and mildly nerdy method that is far to silly to explain. I’m happier now. I’ll reiterate that if all the other things are equal then the players are fully and unbreakably tied, and this is shown as such in the table!

If you head over to the stats page then you’ll see the all-time scores table in all it’s massive glory. Atop it sits Simon Rutter, who has been at the top of that table for fifteen straight years now. He is on 880, with Mark Coughlan 92 points behind in second (where he has sat for fourteen years himself), Antony Brown a further 47 back in third (no mean feat for a player who started four years after the others at the top) and Ross Turnbull is fourth, 18 points adrift of the top three. I highlight these players because all four could, in theory, hit a thousand if they play well this year!

Admittedly for Mark, Antony and Ross they’d require suspiciously high scores (212, 259 and 277 out of the maximum 300 respectively) but Simon is definitely within striking distance – 120 away is doable, last year’s victor scored 135 and Simon himself has a PB of 88 which isn’t too far away. I’m excited – this milestone is one that was never contemplated when this all started. I suppose, realistically, I shouldn’t get too excited. Simon averages 55 points per appearance so it’s statistically unlikely this year, or even next. But with a good performance, it could be this year. I’d love it to be. I might even make a first player to 1000 certificate (remember when I used to make certificates? I should start doing that again) to commemorate the occasion.

Please Simon, do well. It’d be epic!

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!

Welcome to the optimistically titled “more depth” section of the Advent Calendar Challenge website. I’ve been hoping to add more content (and/or redesign the whole website) for ages now and I’ve come to the conclusion that a “blog” of sorts is how is to get things moving. I will aim to post every couple of days with an article that either examines statsitics, details an aspect of the history of the competition or explains what on earth is going on. Lets see how long it lasts!

As it’s day 1, I am minded to cast my eye over player numbers over time. I’m told this should be a line graph but it took me ages to get the charts script working as a stacked bar chart and so that it remains!

After a rapid early growth, the graph shows a steady decline is setting in – only once (2012, perhaps an Olympics hangover? Probably not…) have the player numbers topped 50. This year, at the time of writing, 44 players are signed up, comprised of 40 returning players and 4 new players. New players, by the way, are a statistic that varies apparently randomly:

I am not concerned by the wane in player numbers, as yet. Firstly, as it goes it isn’t a significant one. The rules of the competition almost arbitrarily set the minimum number of players as 12, which we are nowhere near (I can’t remember exactly, but I am fairly sure I originally chose 12 as that was the number of players who survived* the first edition, and so that became the benchmark). Secondly I am happy to keep the competition to people I know and their trusted friends, and of that field only the subset who want to play – the overall number might shrink but overall, there’s still a good few people who want to play. Frankly, I won’t be concerned until we only get 11 players one year…

The number of players each year graph is new and now updating live on the statistics page. See, this blog has done some good already 🙂

* thirteen played, but one was disqualified