c4countdown

Gavin Chipper

Gevin - nice to see you posting and yourself too Julian. What you doing these days?? Hello Tom! You probably did notice that I included you as one of the best non-champions. Maybe it would be interesting to see a mini tournament! Regarding Chris and Conor - it's interesting how heavily Conor beat C...

Gavin Chipper

I think Jono's octochamp run proves that if you can nail your opponent on the numbers then you can afford to make shit up in about half of the letters rounds and still win comfortably. But joking aside, if you are the champion you only choose once, and it's very likely that the other two games will...

Gavin Chipper

I used it because Soo has got all the percentage of maximum scores for Ocotchamps on his website. Although I see no reason why it is a particularly bad statisitc to use, as opposed to just an averagely bad one (in that they're all bad). Care to explain? Well, player A gets the maximum in every lett...

Gavin Chipper

Basically, the point being that if an infinite number of random Johns performed the same task, picking the comparison people at random, 6/11 of them (of the ones that were 5-4 up) would find that they were taller than the next person. Or if it doesn't make sense to talk about infinite, the proporti...

Gavin Chipper

Charlie - re another Supreme Championship - Damian has firmly knocked that idea on the head, he said there definitely won't be another one on his watch. Though I bitterly argued with him at the time, I've come to realize that he was right - if there were another one, the vast majority of the contes...

Gavin Chipper

I feel compelled to point out that 6/11 is merely a decent guess at the probability, and not the actual probability, which we couldn't possibly know from the information given. I'm not particularly bothered, just wanted to pick holes in someone else's puzzle. And because it would effect the answer ...

Gavin Chipper

Kirk Bevins wrote:I don't get this problem. Surely if he is say 190cm, then there are infinitely many heights below this and infinitely above this so the probability is 1/2 or 1 - but these are both wrong. I don't really understand your question.

It's just based purely on the comparisons he's already made.

Gavin Chipper

Hmm. 6/11? I'm not too sure, and I can a potential flaw with what I've done, but it's the best I've got. What's your reasoning for this? Call john J, and anyone else X. You can write it out as |X|X|X|X|X|J|X|X|X|X| | is where the next person must go (since there can't be two people with the same he...

Gavin Chipper

Again I may as well state the obvious. Is it 10? I can't see any way of determining any other answer with the data we're given. Nope. I would've thought 9, given that he's the tenth person and each person gets on independently of all the others. But maybe I need to think about this more carefully. ...

Gavin Chipper

Ben Pugh wrote:1/2?

Nope.

Joseph Bolas wrote:This may sound weird but is there a 100% chance (so 1/1) that the next guy is shorter than he is?

Nope!

Gavin Chipper

I have worked this out, and the figure does seem wrong, but I will post what I got anyway (on the very very slim chance I may be right :lol:): Out of the 1024 possible combinations, only 512 can end with a short person. There are a total of 126 combinations out of the remaining 512, where there are...

Gavin Chipper

Conor wrote:Hmm. 6/11?
I'm not too sure, and I can a potential flaw with what I've done, but it's the best I've got.

What's your reasoning for this?

Gavin Chipper

If you were to take all the possibilits of 10 people regardless of height then it should be 1024? Then if you take all the combinations out of those 1024 where there are 6-small & 4 large (first 9 in any order, the 10th being short) then that number, over 1024, simplified (if possible), should ...

Gavin Chipper

dinos_the_chemist wrote:This seems too obvious so is probably wrong but I may as well go ahead and say it. 5/9?

Nope.

Gavin Chipper

Ah, it's me isn't it? It's that one isn't it, where you say "you're driving a bus", and then do all that other crazy shit, and then ask the driver's name, and you're supposed to be all like "wtf?!!1 the driver's name? but what about all the people getting on and off and that??!!"...

Gavin Chipper

John has no idea how tall he is relative to other people, so he decides to compare his height with some. After nine random comparisons, he is taller than five and shorter than four. Assuming that no two people are exactly the same height, what is the probability that he will be taller than the next ...

Gavin Chipper

Every day there is a bus that travels from A to B, taking people who live at A to B. Each day, each resident of A has an equal chance of getting on the bus, and their chance of getting the bus is completely independent of anyone else. There are also thousands of residents of A, so by getting on the ...

Gavin Chipper

That's all somewhat pointless really. There's no point comparing live rounds, 'crucial' conundrums and other high pressure situtations with my games where I won comfortably because they're completely different. Yeah, alright. But it's the best comparison I could think of at the time. Most statistic...

Gavin Chipper

What about the rule on getting two zeros (say 4-4 and 5-5) and dividing them by each other and declaring the answer to be the total you are after?

Gavin Chipper

The intermediate results do have to be integers, though, which would be difficult to check otherwise. WTP calculated that this does actually make a few games impossible which would otherwise be possible, which is interesting. But in some cases it would be obvious that it always remains an integer, ...

Gavin Chipper

Regarding Beevers v Gallen - looking at the Countdown Corral, Craig scored 92.1% of the possible in his Octochamp run and Paul 83.8%. Obviously this doesn't count as Paul Gallen's greatness is based on the premise that he improved massively for the CofC. So looking at those four games: 125/141 118/1...

Gavin Chipper

That still rewards plodders over flair players. My system? I don't see why really. Obviously the plodders are being rewarded in the particular rounds where the flair players have their words disallowed, but that's how it should be. I can't see any other way. However, the scoring system that we use ...

Gavin Chipper

One last post for now - if this is about par, then if in your games you get a lot of easy distributions, you might always get the best word (say it's an 8) but there might be lots of 8s, so it might be par so you don't get anywhere. One way of doing it might be to have the letters games given a rank...

Gavin Chipper

So you're saying that giving them 4 or 5 less than they had is preferable to giving them 1 or 2 more? Hmmmmm. Well, the point is that we don't know what they got. But the ranking score for number of letter doesn't have to be linear. As an example, you could have a scoring system where the ranking s...

Gavin Chipper

Julian, I know that you don't seem to like being mentioned alongside these other greats and say how you wouldn't take them to a crucial conundrum etc., but I think you've said yourself that you let yourself get out of practice so it's not necessarily indicative of you at your peak. There must be som...

Gavin Chipper

Speaking of inifinity, I think it's quite funny that in a distribution such as the normal distribution where you always get a finite positive value for the density at that point, the average value (which must be infinitessimally small) must be lower than it is for any particular value!

Gavin Chipper

If this is like the par score on UKGameshows, then one criticism is that it punishes disallowed words harshly. I don't think it does. If a player has an eight disallowed and their opponent gets a seven, then the program puts their offering down as a six (offering nonwords should be punished, but no...

Gavin Chipper

I started to think about Benford's Law and wondered if I could use this at all. Completely irrelevant to the puzzle, but a quote from the Wikipedia article: Benford's law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many real-life sources of data, the leading digit is 1 al...

Gavin Chipper

It's amusing that in your explanation here, for the first two possibilities you blithely state that it's a 50/50 chance whether you're seeing the higher or lower of the two numbers, when that's the very thing you're trying to disprove... :shock: Is it? But I've been converted now though. If I pick ...

Gavin Chipper

Ginger Jono wrote:At their respective peaks, the best are Gallen and Beevers. The most impressive ever are Julian for his word defining and Hansford for being weird.

These are indisputable truths.

I think Stuart Solomons was also pretty impressive at being weird.

Gavin Chipper

With the possible exception of Allan saldanha. Based only on the Saldanha games I've seen on The Countdown Page, I would say Paul Howe on the form he showed was a much stronger player; Saldanha did miss plenty but was also very capable of streaks of brilliance. Of course, Saldanha also gets a load ...

Gavin Chipper

Gevin/Gavin: your post is logical enough but you've answered your own question/point - DC have allowed the likes of PENURIES before so they're not going to be too dogmatic about these things. By the way that is NOT your cue to start bashing DC again as you have done so many times in the past... Wel...

Gavin Chipper

I'd be tempted to say that things average out over time and someone probably won't have harder games on average over a whole run than someone else, but then I think they do sometimes change the way the letters come out so some people do have it easier than others. I would say it's not a pointless ex...

Gavin Chipper

Ginger Jono wrote:Do a series of polls of every player ever, in knockout format.

Every player? There was once upon a time a series of polls on an old Yahoo group, but it didn't include every player, just about 72 of them.

Gavin Chipper

Also the above post was written by the greatest untrophied player in the history of Countdown. With the possible exception of Allan saldanha. Ah sod it, there's only one answer. Gevin mate, can you please start a 'Greatest Countdowner ever' thread in the general forum/ I promise not to delete or lo...

Gavin Chipper

Right, I've thought about this and it is right. Sorry Paul for doubting you. To explain in my own words: C1 os the number on the first card and C2 the number on the second. We have four possibilities: C1 and C2 are both higher than x - 50/50 chance of winning C1 and C2 are both lower than x - 50/50 ...

Gavin Chipper

Any properly defined (ie its integral over the reals is one) distribution will work. Randomly drawn numbers implicitly come from such a distribution. Saying "what about other distributions" is kind of like saying "well what if 1=2?". Just doesn't make sense. All that's required ...

Gavin Chipper

Also, I don't see why it would make any difference if I picked a number before or after seeing the first card. So I could make it better to pick higher or lower depending on what I felt like. But then I could have an opponent who is shown the same cards and always does the opposite of me. We can't ...

Gavin Chipper

Actually it is correct, just picking 0 every time is a special case, which I was a bit too dismissive to realise as your justification was wrong. The correct solution is also significantly more general in that you could pick ANY number and it would still work, or pick a different number each time. ...

Gavin Chipper

Also, I don't see why it would make any difference if I picked a number before or after seeing the first card. So I could make it better to pick higher or lower depending on what I felt like. But then I could have an opponent who is shown the same cards and always does the opposite of me. We can't b...

Gavin Chipper

Yes! Well done mate. The only way this could be wrong is if your number never lies between my numbers, but since this happens with finite (although admittedly very small) probability, this is not the case. This sounds a bit shaky to me. I could pick my number to be zero. And then I would always go ...

Gavin Chipper

Actually, there is a way to construct this so that you can't make inferences from previous games, unfortunately it's less easy to tell you why this is so, as the proof is rather non-elementary and technical. Well, you could tell us we have just one go at it. Or that our memories are wiped after eac...

Gavin Chipper

the frivolous law of large numbers states that most numbers are very very large - surely that doesn't count as advanced mathematics? :P Haha, I've never heard that expression before. I have to admit that after you said that I spent 5 minutes feeling embarrassed because I couldn't figure out how to ...

Gavin Chipper

Edit - Having said that, it should be symmetrical around any finite number Nope! Michael, no advanced mathematics is required for this problem. I think anyone on here could come up with the solution, given a suitable flash of insight. Well, I'm going to bed now, but I'll leave you with - do these n...

Gavin Chipper

Ah yes, Graham Nash and his shock win. To be honest I think he sort of hinted at it with his post with everyone's odds of winning. That's the sort of thing a winner does. Julian, you failing to win this CofC and Conor in the next - once someone said to me (on another non-Countdown forum actually) th...

Gavin Chipper

There is no requirement for symmetry about zero. The answer you and Conor gave supposes that 0 is the "middle" of the numbers, which seems sensible at first glance but is actually false; for any number we can think of there are an infinity of numbers above it and an infinity below, so the...

Gavin Chipper

I'm going to use my usual think-as-I-type method rather than thinking first. I've heard of something vaguely similar where there are two amounts of money and one is double the other and you "should" always swap because you'd average more by doing so. But I won't get into why that's silly h...

Gavin Chipper

Since I have just made a post about mass nouns elsewhere, I will link to it here as this is the home of the discussion. Sod it - I'll copy the whole post. http://www.c4countdown.co.uk/viewtopic.php?p=599&sid=1e265d7274d5b178dfdbd4b619e9bcef#p599 Re the point made by the master himself: ALIMONY i...

Gavin Chipper

Re the point made by the master himself: ALIMONY is indeed a mass noun, although of course that doesn't necessarily mean ALIMONIES wouldn't be allowed (it's a great spot incidentally - I certainly didn't think of it). Any views on whether DC would allow it, if a contestant offered it? If it helps, ...

Gavin Chipper

Yes, people seem to agree with what I would say. Swap in the normal scenario and it's 50/50 in the other.

Gavin Chipper

As far as I understand there's no rule about knowing the running totals is there? It would seem a bizarre rule.

Gavin Chipper

Correct Soo :D thats the best strategy (there are probably a few others with slight variations). I think I know the 4 people scenario you mean, Joseph (there's also a wall behind the front person right?) but I chose this one as its probably a bit more obscure (If not a bit ambiguously explained by ...

Gavin Chipper

Why has viewing the C4Countdown Yahoo Group become a members only pursuit? Obviously one can log in, but since posting is generally discouraged, it seems a bit of a waste of time if one just wants to browse posts.

Gavin Chipper

Okay Gevin, I think I am judging you on posts I have read whilst lurking on your own Countdown group. You just came across as a splitter but I am happy to start off anew since this is a new site and petty arguments are best left to one side. **handshake** Excellent! I'm not 100% sure what a splitte...

Gavin Chipper

Conor wrote:And Red Bull is supposed to give you energy...

It enabled two pringles to defy gravity and float to the top of a cup.

Gavin Chipper

David O'Donnell wrote:
Corby wrote:
Gevin-Gavin wrote:10: 0-0-0-2-2-2-2-1-0-91
Any four from the first seven pirates to get two coins.

Am I any closer?
I agree completely with this answer
Please post the answer Corby before I go insane.

It's in the post you quoted.

Gavin Chipper

I'm still considering merging Recaps with Spoilers. Maybe we can have a poll. If anything, I would merge spoilers with the general forum and leave the recaps. I had the idea that you had a separate recap forum so that it could be left uncluttered and someone could go and find a specific game easily...

Gavin Chipper

What do you guys reckon? :mrgreen: I reckon a suggestion thread is a good idea. That's the only suggestion I liked though. Re-introducing spoiler space? Retarded, when we have the facility to get around such a crude technique. I think maybe the recap and spoiler threads could be merged with the day...

Gavin Chipper

Oh my God!!! Are you seriously criticising the forum after making a point of critising the mailing list? You just want to cause trouble; your posts are endless and boring in the extreme: why don't you bog off? What is your problem? It's not a criticism, but a suggestion. Or at least a constructive ...

Gavin Chipper

Joseph Bolas wrote:It would be ideal IMO to have at least the following in separate forums/subforums:

Polls
Recaps
CO-Events
Spoilers
Photos
Non-Countdown Topics

OK, so you're the opposite! Oh well, it's interesting to see what different people think.

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