Category: sport

Superbru’s Closeness Index Equation Is Copied From 1969 Apollo 11 Mission – But Might Just Work

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According to recent stats that we just made up, everyone in South Africa plays Superbru, the free online sports prediction game. I’m a veteran, having played and won Superbru pools in football, cricket and rugby over the last 5 years, including a top 2% finish in last year’s Rugby World Cup with over 130,000 players, and I’m looking forward to their Premiership and Tri-Nations Rugby Championship games starting this weekend.

While in rugby, you’re asked to predict the winner of the game and the winning margin, in football, you are asked to predict the actual score. You get points for predicting which team wins and you also get points for “being close” to the actual score. But what defines “closeness” in predicting football scores?

Superbru have devised their own system, resulting in what they call the “Closeness Index”:

We believe two things determine how close your pick was to the actual score. Goal difference shows how close you thought the game would be. But, a goal difference of 1 applies equally to 1-0 and 5-4. If the real result was 2-1, then surely the 1-0 is a better pick than 5-4?

Total number of goals helps us refine this. In the example above, there were 3 goals (2-1). One pick said there would be 1 goal (1-0) and the other 9 goals (5-4). 1 goal is closer to 3 than 9.

We factor both goal difference and total number of goals into a formula called the Closeness Index (CI). The lower your CI, the closer you were to the actual score (0.00 is a perfect pick).

All of which sounds very nice, but how exactly do they “factor both goal difference and total number of goals”. Well, they tell us this too:

Closeness Index (CI) = (your goal diff – actual goal diff) + ((your tot. goals – actual tot. goals) / 2)

Example:
Actual score: 2 – 1
Your prediction: 1 – 0

Closeness Index (CI) = (1 – 1) + ((1 – 3) / 2 )
= (0) + (-2 / 2 )
= 0 + 1
= 1

Well done. Extra marks for showing your working there.

However, eagle eyed astronomers and physics graduate readers will recongise that equation:

C = (b – a) + ((x – 1y)/2)

as being the lynchpin of the calculation used to safely land the LM-5 Lunar Module on the surface of the moon in 1969 (the only difference being the lack of the 0.15 correction factor for the gravitational pull of the moon). Now, using this formula may seem to be an unnecessarily complex (one small) step by Superbru, but you have to applaud their efforts in attempting to quantify the unquantifiable in order to make their game fairer. In addition (no pun intended), you’d do well to remember that this equation was successful in getting Neil et al onto the moon, so by my extrapolation, it’ll probably work really well in this scenario as well.

Of course, there will be those who will claim that since the moon landings were faked then the Superbru Closeness Index is also fundamentally flawed. For this reason, I will be making all my Premiership picks from a makeshift film studio in a Hollywood basement.

Stoke City to beat Reading 2-1. Near the Sea of Tranquillity. Probably.

Wednesday ephemera

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Loads of things to write about but none of them deserving a full post of their own (although some other bloggers may disagree)?
It’s time for Wednesday ephemera!

Please feel free to while away your day with these links:

In a week that gave everywhere except Cape Town some snow, Windguru is predicting 10.2m seas and wind gusts of 91kph for the Mother City on Saturday | Nice wine | xkcd finally comes up with a way of stopping Michael Phelps | The 1% differences that gave TeamGB’s cyclists the edge at the Olympics | Great photos from Brian Micklethwait’s view from the train | And via that, the “battery-shaped” tower that uses less electricity | Batman doesn’t need to hear about Gauteng’s weather again | Data analysis of Star Trek deaths illustrates danger of wearing a red shirt | Baby octopuseseseses | How to make tiny rockets from matches | How big is the moon, really? | Hyperdecant your red wine (really?) | What your suitcase sees post check-in | Following the reindeer by Evgenia Arbugaeva

Please email me with any suggestions for the next ephemera post.

Big Boys

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I was reading this article (which I linked to from here) when I spotted this article and I thought it was worth a look.

Ricardo Blas Jr: Competing in the +100kg judo, Blas Jr. is a whopping 34st5lbs – more than 10st heavier than any other athlete in the whole Olympics and 6st10lbs heavier than the entire Japanese women’s gymnastics team put together.

They make them big in Guam.

Popping that into metric for you, Blas Jr’s page on the official London 2012 Android app states that he is 185cm in height and… er… 218kg. That’s 63kg heavier than the 203cm tall Rafael Silva of Brazil (also a judo competitor), who is just a puny 155kg. Pfft.

And talking of that Japanese women’s gymnastics team, step forward Asuka Teramoto in that Japanese team: 21 years old, 136cm tall and 30kg. So less than one seventh the weight of Blas Jr and about 4kg heavier than my 6 year old son.

Now that their respective events have been completed, I would pay big bucks to see Blas Jr and Teramoto swap sports for an entertaining demonstration session.
Please could someone make this happen and have the necessary medical personnel on standby?

Thanks in advance.

Also – read about the oldest 2012 Olympian here.

Take the crown

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Yes, I’ve been watching the Olympics and I’ve been happy with Team GB’s progress (once they started progressing, that is), but last night, during a cheese and wine event to celebrate Mrs 6000’s birthday, Sheffield’s own Jessica Ennis taking the gold medal in the Heptathlon was the crowning glory for me.

This photo (from my Dad) is the giant Adidas poster which accurately predicted Ennis’ success on one of the stores in the city centre.

Meanwhile, hundreds of local supporters turned out to watch the whole event on big screens at Don Valley Stadium, where Ennis began her athletics career.

This is incredible…

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Mrs 6000 keeps chucking random Olympics questions at me, pub quiz style.

Many of these I can answer straight off:

“Gold medals are only 1.34% gold”
“Because he swam faster than the other bloke”
“Red at the top”, and
“That’s the Queen” etc etc.

Then last night, she popped the old “Who’s the oldest competitor at the 2012 Olympics?” one at me.

Fortunately, I was able to consult Dave Google and quickly come up with the answer:

Hiroshi Hoketsu, who will represent Japan in the equestrian discipline of dressage at the age of 71 is the oldest competitor in the London 2012 Olympics.

He’s 71. Seventy one. Imagine what the 71 year olds you know are doing during the Olympics. Knitting? Visiting the doctor? Hell, if they can walk unaided to the shops, they’re doing ok.

And his story is amazing. He hasn’t seen Motoko, his wife, for over a year, because he lives and trains in Germany and she lives back in Japan.

It is difficult to be away from home for this long as an old man and I owe everything to her patience and understanding.

But this isn’t his first Olympics – it’s his third. His first, incredibly, was in Tokyo back in 1964 – a full 48 years ago. That, in case you are numerically challenged, is the same as SA swimmer Chad le Clos still competing in the 2060 Olympics. Wor Chad would be 68 by then, so still not quite matching Hoketsu’s age.

This will probably be Hoketsu’s last Olympics:

My wife would like for this to be my last year of competition and that will probably be the case. But I still feel my riding is improving, little by little. That is my motivation. I am a better rider at 70 than I was at 40. Most people can’t tell but my body is getting a little weaker. My horse knows it and she helps me.

But if he did make it to Rio in 2016, he would beat the record of Swedish shooter Oscar Swahn, who won bronze at the age of 72 at the 1920 Antwerp Games.

I know that a 75 year old competing in the Olympics seems a little far-fetched, but if you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have said the same about a 71 year old.