Nats Stunt Tabulation Program

[Howard Rush]

I wrote a program to do the Nats stunt data processing. It's in Excel and Visual Basic for Applications, so anybody can see and use it. Everybody has Excel. Nothing is locked or protected, and no password is required. This program replaces Shareen's program, which was in oddball database software. I figured that it would be easy to do over from scratch, but it wasn't. Paul used a draft of the new program at the last Nats. It worked OK, but left him in the lurch after top 20 day started.

One of my conditions for accepting the job of writing the program is that it be made available to anybody who wants a copy. That way, everybody can see how it works, and nobody can accuse it of shennanigans-- peculiar statistics and stupid, inefficient programming, but not shennanigans. It replaces fair, but difficult-to-describe processes with hard rules:

1. It uses the method Paul published which takes historical Nats performance data to seed contestants.

2. It uses random draws for each round to assign flight orders.

3. It includes a formula to assess judge performance. The program merely uses Paul's formula (below, if I can get it to come out in a readable format) to assign a number to a judge. It is a codified form of the method that's been used for years by eyeball. The Nats event director can use judge performance in earlier rounds to determine who gets to judge in later rounds. I presume this method has been made public, too.

The formula is attached somewhere.  I don't know how to make it come out in a block of text.

Exceedance weighting is an arbitrary constant set by the event director before the contest and used for all judge scores for the whole contest.

For a given flight i, an exceedance occurs when |judge’s placing of pilot, flight i – consensus placing of pilot, flight i| > 3 X the average of |judge’s placing of pilot– consensus placing of pilot|, where consensus is the average placing by all the judges of a given pilot’s flight among all the flights in the round.



I'll send drafts of this program around. I'll email it to anybody who wants it. Beware that it's a good 5 MB; I told you it is inefficient.

[Dave Cook]

Howard,
Thanks for your effort in setting up Tabulation at the Nat's. Having been the originator of computer tabulation programs I can appreciate the effort. I wrote the original program for Nat's and FAI's tabulation. They were written in Filemaker and were successful in running many FAI's and Nat's.

A lot of people would take exception to Filemaker being called an oddball database. For this application it is far better and easier to set up than Excel or Visual Basic. You should get a copy to look at.

We also set up a direct dump from Filemaker to Excel to chart both flyer's and judge's performance maneuver by maneuver. I would like a copy of your evaluation program to look at.

Thanks,
Dave Cook

 

[Howard Rush]

So you're the guy.  Well done.  See my comments elsewhere.  You can tell what a whiz-bang programmer I am by my taking a photo of the formula on my computer screen as a means of transferring it here.  You gotta admit that I did a good job of Photoshopping out the Whiteout I used on the screen to make corrections.