c4countdown

James Robinson wrote:

Rhys Benjamin wrote:I saw a small cutting from the Daily Telegraph about it.

Yeah, and now our favourite newspaper has got in on the act, as have their readers, if you look at the comments at the bottom:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... enius.html

Haha, classic reporting:

"Kai Laddiman became the youngest ever 'octo-champions' when he won eight shows in a row in 2008" <-- if only there was a wiki for Countdown where you could easily check these facts (and how to grammar).

Nice that the top rated comments are all positive. I was expecting a flood of "HE MAY BE GOOD AT COUNTDOWN BUT THAT'S NOT GOING TO HELP HIM NOW THE CUT'S ARE COMMING AND THE IMMIGRANTS ARE MURDERING DIANA FOR OUR JOBS AND SCHOOLS AND OUR BOYS"

They also took a photo of him with his winning score of 100. He scored more than this didn't he - in fact the next picture down you see his opponent's score has increased by 10. Good to see him in Metro today too - another surprise.

No doubt everyone who yelled about apterous killing Countdown will be equally keen to give it some credit for all the good publicity Jack's getting now.

On the homepage of Yahoo! UK now, awesome!

I'd like to put in a word for the cannon-fodder. We've seen an awful lot of people lately who will have come with high hopes of a win or two and discovered very early in the day that the best they can hope for is a thrashing. Yet they have responded with unfailing good humour, and kept plugging away till the end.

David Williams wrote:I'd like to put in a word for the cannon-fodder. We've seen an awful lot of people lately who will have come with high hopes of a win or two and discovered very early in the day that the best they can hope for is a thrashing. Yet they have responded with unfailing good humour, and kept plugging away till the end.

I would like to add that My opponents were all really nice people, and took the losses in a really gracious manner, both off set and on set. Also whilst I am at it, I think I may have had a relatively easy octorun in terms of nines available and difficulty of numbers rounds, but I also think that the quality of opponents was higher than the quality I've seen against most octochamps since I have been watching the show religiously. (That sounds really boastful and arrogant, but Im really saying it to give kudos to all my opponents especially Alex, who I thought was probably better than 95% of the contestants in series 62, and its a real shame he didnt get the chance to go far)

This will be the best series finals in a long time.

JackHurst wrote:My opponents were all really nice people, and took the losses in a really gracious manner, both off set and on set. Also whilst I am at it, I think I may have had a relatively easy octorun in terms of nines available and difficulty of numbers rounds, but I also think that the quality of opponents was higher than the quality I've seen against most octochamps since I have been watching the show religiously.

I'd agree with that. Interesting exercise for someone - offerings of the eight beaten contestants as a percentage of the available maximum for octochamps down the years.

David Williams wrote:

JackHurst wrote:My opponents were all really nice people, and took the losses in a really gracious manner, both off set and on set. Also whilst I am at it, I think I may have had a relatively easy octorun in terms of nines available and difficulty of numbers rounds, but I also think that the quality of opponents was higher than the quality I've seen against most octochamps since I have been watching the show religiously.

I'd agree with that. Interesting exercise for someone - offerings of the eight beaten contestants as a percentage of the available maximum for octochamps down the years.

One measure for rating the opponents, and I know it's not in any way reliable, is how did I fare against an octochamp's opponents.

In this case, I beat seven of them, the exception being Charlie, to whom I lost by three points. Seven is a better score than I usually get against an octochamp's opponents. But then I may have been concentrating better.

We've got a lot of data now. I think some sort of metric which compares the length/accuracy of their offerings against the max available would be a good start.

Jon O'Neill wrote:We've got a lot of data now. I think some sort of metric which compares the length/accuracy of their offerings against the max available would be a good start.

Is there a list of number of maxes for octochamps? I know some recaps have this total in for each game, but not all of them it seems.

JackHurst wrote: I would like to add that My opponents were all really nice people, and took the losses in a really gracious manner, both off set and on set. Also whilst I am at it, I think I may have had a relatively easy octorun in terms of nines available and difficulty of numbers rounds, but I also think that the quality of opponents was higher than the quality I've seen against most octochamps since I have been watching the show religiously. (That sounds really boastful and arrogant, but Im really saying it to give kudos to all my opponents especially Alex, who I thought was probably better than 95% of the contestants in series 62, and its a real shame he didnt get the chance to go far)

Excluding mine, which was clearly the hardest, the hardest I can remember was Neil Zussman's.

Jon O'Neill wrote:We've got a lot of data now. I think some sort of metric which compares the length/accuracy of their offerings against the max available would be a good start.

This is back to the perennial problem of how you avoid over-punishing invalid words.

Charlie Reams wrote:

Jon O'Neill wrote:We've got a lot of data now. I think some sort of metric which compares the length/accuracy of their offerings against the max available would be a good start.

This is back to the perennial problem of how you avoid over-punishing invalid words.

Just % of maxes then.

Jon O'Neill wrote:

Charlie Reams wrote:

Jon O'Neill wrote:We've got a lot of data now. I think some sort of metric which compares the length/accuracy of their offerings against the max available would be a good start.

This is back to the perennial problem of how you avoid over-punishing invalid words.

Just % of maxes then.

Or you could have a system where you are rewarded more for getting maxes, so like a 6 when the max is 7 doesn't get 6/7 of the max score, but less (in some way). Could get complicated though. You could have a sort of reciprocal system where the max score 1, 1 away gets 0.5, 2 away gets 0.3333 etc.

Here are some numbers for starters.

These are for octochamps during series 49 to 61 inclusive, using some data I pulled together a while ago. This covers 66 octochamps, 5808 letters rounds, 1584 numbers rounds. I've ignored the conundrum partly because I don't like them but more because it's usually impossible to say whether Jack's opponents would have got them.

87.8 Average max available per game (letters rounds only)
82.8 Percentage of max achieved (raw score)

29.5 Average max available per game (numbers rounds only)
84.0 Percentage of max achieved (raw score)

117.3 Average max available per game (letters and numbers)
83.0 Percentage of max achieved (raw score, letters and numbers)

0.81 Average number of invalid or null contributions per game (letters and numbers)
7.23 Average number of maxes per game (letters and numbers)

I guess I could fairly easily regenerate along the lines Gavin suggested. I could also generate the equivalent numbers for the 528 victims.