Thursday 28 July 2016

Darts wave fone-tuning [sic]

Hello,
it may be a little bit early to talk about fine-tuning, or "fribbing", as I believe some people call it. Fribbing is apparently more fine than frobbing, just as twiddling is more fine than twoddling. So I guess you could say I'm not yet fine-tuning, but just fone-tuning.

Ask Steven Pinker for a clearer explanation of that first paragraph if it made no sense.

Anyway, some things I've noticed as a result of having used my darts wave a few times and made a few improvements (see the last few posts of the Massive Blog for more details) are:
  • that it remains very good, 
  • that it indeed keeps getting better as a result of the improvements
  • that it does help to use it a few times to find minor errors in the spreadsheet
  • that if you have a momentum score based on the last 15 visits to the board then this can go down when you throw a ton-40 if you threw a ton-80 16 throws ago.
This last point is quite interesting. Clearly, it doesn't matter how many throws you take into account. If the 180 leaves the relevant data range at the same moment as the 140 enters it, then your momentum will drop. Just as your ranking points will drop in tennis or whatever if you are only runner-up in a tournament which you won the year (or two years) before. This seems largely unavoidable.

However, there is one points-based system which I believe is universally revered and respected, and that is the FIFA world ranking system for international football teams. I don't want to get into the nitty-gritty so I'll stick to the notty-grotty, which includes the fact that if a football match was three-and-a-half years ago, then it contributes less to your ranking than if a match was last Wednesday.

I haven't experimented yet, but this has certainly given me the idea of making the last 5 visits to the board of my wave count more, the 6th to 10th visits count less and the 11th to 15th visits count even less. This could potentially counteract the issue of your ranking dropping when you hit a 140. Probably not in every case, but possibly in many cases.

Worth thinking about anyway. I will probably do a couple of trial runs and post something about them in the near future. In the mean time, why not read my other posts about the FIFA world rankings, like this one here.

PS: Just in case you're interested but not interested enough to have clicked on the link, the current top five world football teams, in order, are: Argentina, Belgium, Columbia, Germany and Chile.


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