BrainBashers Common Entries August - RESULTS

Hi,

Before I post the official results, I have posted the current standings below.

There were 1,538 entries for August.
http://www.brainbashers.com/overflow1/common/ commonentries.htm

The file is aroun 174K

I know people like to check the results after they are posted, but I thought I give you the opportunity first. I have tried to verify all of the songs (which was a nightmare) - but there may be errors...

Kev

After just posting the results , I noticed Michael's entry.

You failed mate.

The song Q and the actess Q threw me off (still can't believe I didn't come up with Julia Roberts!) I posted as Steve Mark...

On Tue, 3 Sep 2002 19:34:34 +0100, 'Kevin Stone'

Hi,

Loads of tripe is entered - good luck to 'em.

Kevin Stone schrieb:

You mean my _other_ entry. (Gotcha!)

Well, considering my 'common' entry barely made the top 500, scoring 18th from the bottom with my 'rare' entry is not bad, especially since I submitted valid (?) entries for all questions, which not everybody did.

I botched the 'famous actress', underrating Shirley Temple's present-day fan base. And 'omega' was a very obvious rare leter to choose - omicron would have been a better choice. Having to name a real planet (instead of 'Rupert' is a handicap, too - I picked the least favoured one correctly!

Btw, why did I answer '10' on Q1? You only list 9 results! Same effect: 1526 Matthew Powell, Q2=322. Kara Lewett, Q3=41. I think you can find that on all of the questions - people answering one past the listed last result!

Curiously, the letter 'U' is absent from the 'name a letter' results - is that a fact, or an artifact of your scoring/filtering software? Letters 'Kay' and 'Er' should be collated with 'K' and 'R', IMHO.

'Love is all we need' = 'Love is all you need' = from 'All you need is love'?

You seem to have made a fine job of collating misspelled entries this time - thanks for running the contest!

Have fun with double submissions

Hi,

I ruled that VENDREDI didn't exist and I replaced it with NOTHING - which is the 10th common answer! I wouldn't have done that if it didn't appear in the top 10



In fact, NOTHING is the answer which occurs after all of the others.

As it happens, no-one entered U for Q7 and I also diagree that Kay and Er should be changed. The question was quite clear, and if people want to be 'clever' then they can expect to lose



Artist: Mary J Blige Album: Share My World

Artist: Israel Vibration Album: Sugar Me

Artist: Beatles Album: Yellow Submarine

So you see, I can't change their entries - just in case this is what they meant!

I had some fun here (*not*), I checked nearly all songs to make sure they existed and you'd be surprised by the fact that the songs entered in error do actually exist.

The database which keeps track of the changes made (as in what equals what) reached 1,469 entries this month: Q1: 44 Q2: 369 Q3: 70 Q4: 129 Q5: 248 Q6: 275 Q7: 8 Q8: 59 Q9: 39 Q10: 101

Which is why this month I have chosen questions with a smaller range of possible answers.

This also now means that I can now post the revised answers - in a few hours.

Cheers.

Interestingly (or not)...

I came 266

Which is quite poor really - especially as my worst answer was 5th.

The official results are now live:
http://www.brainbashers.com/entry.asp?page=common

Enjoy.

Kevin Stone

Kevin Stone schrieb:

Your final scores are 4 higher in that segment, because you have removed 25 entries overall, for a total of 1513 entries. This also raised some percentages.

Here are some scores from people you might recognize (Top 500 only, and I may have overlooked someone):

180 Gerrit De Blaauw 3 23 3 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 0.1964% 241 Phil Carmody 4 46 1 2 7 1 1 1 1 1 0.0758% 262 Kevin Stone 1 5 3 2 1 5 4 1 1 1 0.0565% 461 Nathan Stohler 4 15 1 1 1 16 1 1 2 12 0.0045% 474 Michael Mendelsohn 1 2 3 10 26 1 1 1 2 10 0.0041%

1512 Michael R. Mendelsohn - 281 30 79 100 40 25 12 9 132

Michael 'Rare' Mendelsohn was beaten only by someone who held that 'Planet Zeeb' can be found in the solar system, 'Up' is a compass direction, and '1' a letter of the alphabet - not really valid under 'Rare' rules. My weekday was 'Vendredi', which was ruled invalid, although that answer would have been perfectly valid in France. Oh well.

Have fun with huge contests

Not quite - I removed it only because it appeared in the main Top 10. If it was 11th I wouldn't have done this.

Most people don't read the entire results, so *mad* answers in the Top 10 could produce a frenzy of such.

You were looking too far down the list

33 Andrew Krywaniuk 1 2 3 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 9.2779%

I still do a double-take when I see results such as:

105 Linda Isaac 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 4 1.0428%

One of the downsides of having thousands of entries is that, depending on which question you choose, one suboptimal answer can really kill your score. Question 2 had the most different answers, but the maximum score was only 155 so you couldn't do much damage. I felt that question 3 was the most difficult, since there were several reasonable answers (as opposed to questions 8&9), but one dominated for some reason I cannot fathom (of course that may be my own particular bias).