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American Idol 6 HTF Challenge: Two pools - The "Original" & the TOP TEN Challenge (1 Viewer)

Ken CM

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01. Blake Lewis
02. Jordan Sparks
03. Melinda Doolittle
04. Sanjaya Malakar
05. Haley Scarnato
06. Lakisha Jones
07. Chris Sligh
08. Gina Glocksen
09. Chris Richardson
10. Phil Stacey
 

RAF

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O.K. 9 "entries" and counting. I'll wait until show time on Tuesday and then compile a complete list of the participants in this "beta" contest. I'm also going to see if I can work something up with an Excel spreadsheet and lookup tables to simplify the tabulation and reporting process. Should be interesting and perhaps impact future "reality" show contests (AI, Amazing Race, Survivor, Big Brother, et. al.).

Stay tuned...
 

NYSandy

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01. Blake Lewis
02. Melinda Doolittle
03. Lakisha Jones
04. Jordan Sparks
05. Haley Scarnato
06. Chris Richardson
07. Chris Sligh
08. Sanjaya Malakar
09. Gina Glocksen
10. Phil Stacey
 

Yee-Ming

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Yay, the rest of us who missed out get to play!

01. Melinda Doolittle
02. Lakisha Jones
03. Blake Lewis
04. Jordin Sparks
05. Chris Sligh
06. Haley Scarnato
07. Chris Richardson
08. Sanjaya Malakar
09. Gina Glocksen
10. Phil Stacey
 

Aaron Silverman

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Yup, thanks bud. As you probably surmised, I just cut & pasted the names from your original list and then was too lazy to notice the numbers. :)
 

RAF

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Exactly, Yee-Ming! That's always been a weakness of the "traditional" method of running these pools here. With a finite number of contestants (like 12 this year in AI6) you are severely limited if only one member can choose a performer for the "top" pick. With this "full list" approach there are literally millions of possible permutations for the list. Of course, if the number of entrants were to become huge then scoring might be a difficult task - but I'm working on a method for all this. Right now we are at eleven (11) entries and I anticipate that a few more will join in before tomorrow night's deadline (8:00 pm EDT 3/27). Then I'll get to the job of creating the list and updating the scores weekly after the Wednesday eliminations. So this year we are running two competitions - the "traditional" one (in the first message of this thread) and the current "Top Ten List" beta.

It should become obvious in a couple of weeks whether this is something that is manageable for most of the reality "contests."
 

RAF

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O.K. Folks. Entries are now closed in our beta test of the HTF American Idol 6 TOP TEN LIST challenge. There are 11 entries as follows:


ENTRY #ENTRANTLIST IN ORDER OF FINSH1NolanJ1Jordin Sparks2Melinda Doolittle3Blake Lewis4Lakisha Jones5Sanjaya Malakar6Chris Richardson7Chris Sligh8Haley Scarnato9Gina Glocksen10Phil Stacey
 

RAF

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Point of information: I'm adding the current results of the "TOP TEN" Challenge to the end of the first message in this thread for easy referral.
 

AnthonyC

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I'm not sure this is exactly what you're asking for but you can take a screenshot and crop it to just the appropriate columns. Just press Print Scrn (right next to F12) and paste/crop it in Microsoft Paint.
 

RAF

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Thanks for the suggestion, Anthony. I'm aware of screenshots, etc. but that really wouldn't help me in this case. For one thing a screenshot would have to be so small (to fit on one screen) that it would be almost unreadable. Alternately, it would require several screenshots to cover all the entries. I was looking to see if there were some way to incorporate my Excel spreadsheet into my message so that those with MS Office could open it and view it.

The way that I produced the list that I published a few messages ago was to do a cut and paste directly from the Excel spreadsheet. The only (minor) problem was that it carried over some of the spreadsheet's formulas and I had to do some editing before posting to stay within the single message character limit. I'm really not concerned about scoring this "beta test" pool since there are only 11 entries. Excel does a great job of doing all the calculations for me and It's going to be easy to update the standings in Message #1 manually. I'm just thinking ahead for future HTF Challenges where me might get considerably more entries thanks to opening up the competition so that more than one person can choose the favorite(s) on top. With 10-20 entries it's an easy task. If we start getting bigger numbers I'm going to want to make the spreadsheet available to entrants who want to see the breakdown of all the scores.

This project has been enjoyable to me because it's been many years since I've programmed spreadsheets. I go all the way back to Visicalc (late 70's - remember that one gang?) and in those days there was a lot more work to do to get spreadsheets to jump through hoops for you. I'm actually looking forward to adding lookup tables to a future version of the HTF Challenge spreadsheet so that I can update one value on a table each week and let Excel take care of all the calculations for me. I also realize that I can create a "Summary" section of the spreadsheet so current totals are in easily readable (and cut and paste) format.

Another way to give people access to the current spreadsheet is to save it to my web site and provide a link here. I intend to do that as this beta test progresses since I think that might be a stopgap that provides full information to the entrants who want score breakdowns.

Stay tuned....

AnthonyC, what do you think of the "Scored List" idea for all our future HTF Challenges? To me it seems to be ideal for Survivor, The Amazing Race, Big Brother and American Idol.

Comments?
 

RAF

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Additional Tie Breaker Rule for the Top Ten Challenge (also added to the rules outlined in a previous message):

(Amended 04/03/07)

In the event of a tie the contest winner will be the entrant who was the fewest spots away from picking the winner. If it's still a tie, then we'll move down the list and determine who was closest to predicting the second spot, and so on, until the tie is eventually broken.

This tie breaker, suggested by Yee-Ming and modified by Bryan X, will eventually break any ties that occur since no two lists can be idential.
 

Ken CM

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Couple of cut and paste suggestions:

1) Copy the cells you want and paste into powerpoint. Then save the powerpoint slide as a JPG.

or

2) Highlight the cells you want. Hold down "shift" key then click on "edit", "Copy Picture". Not sure how this would work with the forum software....
 

AnthonyC

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Agreed...it opens the field to more than a small handful of members and eliminates the frustration you get when you find out your winner pick is taken.
 

Bryan X

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Whooohoooo! I'm in first place!

Sorry, I have to celebrate when I can, because it won't last long. :D
 

RAF

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One down, nine left. Full results in the first message in this thread.

The early leader in the Top 10 Challenge is Bryan X who had Chris Sligh lowest on his list. More to come....

If you are interested in the full Excel spreadsheet it can be downloaded by clicking HERE and opening or saving the Excel (*.xls) file to your hard drive. Note: Excel required on your computer.
 

Yee-Ming

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It now occurs to me (since I'm in joint last place on 5 pts :frowning: ) that given there's so little difference in all our entries for the top 4 (almost all are permutations of Melinda, Lakisha, Blake and Jordin, with only two iconoclasts including Sanjaya or Chris R instead of Lakisha), that this challenge might really be won or lost on how we predict the "bottom 6" are eliminated -- unless Sanjaya or Chris R really finishes in the top 4 and Lakisha is eliminated in sixth place, in which case either Ken CM or Anthony C respectively is going to look like an A&R genius...
 

RAF

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Yes, that is a definite possibility and one of the things that makes this such an interesting "Challenge." I've also considered this when adding my "tie-breaker" rules in the event that it ends up in a dead heat.

According to my quick calculations (mathematicians here might want to check me on this) in a ten position list contest of this type not only is the "best" possible score 0 points but the "worst" possible score would be 50 points (if each of your selections is as far away as possible from the correct answer: e.g. You picked Chris Sligh for first and he came in tenth for 9 points, etc.) That pool of 51 possible scores means that ties will become inevitable if we ever expand these pools in the future to include many more members. Let's just hope that the three tie-breakers I chose does the trick.
 

Bryan X

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Just a thought off the of my head, how about weighting each week with more weight being given as the weeks go on. For example, 1 point for every position you are off guessing the weeks 10 and 9, 2 points for every position you are off guessing weeks 8 and 7, 3 points... etc.

Kinda like the NCAA pools where the proceeding rounds are worth incrementally more points.
 

RAF

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That's an interesting new wrinkle and something I'll think about. I'm not sure how difficult this would be to add to an Excel sheet and whether it's even necessary though. In the NCAA bracket pools your choices, when eliminated, are totally out of the scoring. (For example, if you had Texas - a #4 seed - you probably were counting on getting past the second round, but they lost their 2nd game). In our "List" pool all of your selections remain in play and everyone loses one member of the list each week. It's just how accurately you were in picking when they would leave.

In other words, a weighting system is needed in NCCA bracket pools, since there should be some premium given to having the most teams standing as the end nears. In our pool everyone will have four people alive in the "final four." It's just a matter of who nailed their positions most accurately. And there is a built-in weighting system since the number of points you earn (or don't earn in this particular pool) reflects on the accuracy of your positional picks.

I'm not saying that your suggestion isn't something to think about. I'm just thinking that we should at least let this "beta test" play out to see if we need to make any course corrections before we go "wider" next time. I mainly wanted to come up with something that would allow more people to choose their favorites without severely limiting the number of people who can play. The Top Ten picking order seems to offer that opportunity.
 

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