Just before I start, I’m disappointed that last night’s Minute to Win It is currently nowhere to be “found”. Sort it out, America!
Also I can’t read the lyrics to our Eurovision entry (“You bring the sunshine, I’ll bring the good times!”) without adding “…and I’ll get to Scotland befoooorrre you!” in my mind. I largely suspect this is just me now but you’ll all be doing it by May.
Also also, it’s the last night of Man in Box this evening, the thing that literally nobody’s talking about. I am interested in what happens tomorrow with the reveal, though.
Anyway, you might remember me doing a post before this year’s Krypton Factor attempting to lay to rest the idea that the general knowledge round is rather unfairly weighted and came to the conclusion that although it might look like that sometimes, generally speaking the numbers suggested otherwise – it gives the impression that anyone can win (and that is, in fact, the point), but the person leading going into it still usually wins.
That was based on KF 2009 numbers, where the show was five rounds and the GK round was 70 seconds. This year there were only four rounds and the length of the GK round had increased to 90 seconds. Now is it properly game changing?
Here are the numbers, numbers in brackets are the scores at the end of the round. The first heat ended in a tie, I’m not including the result of that for statistical purposes.
Heat 1: 26 (30), 16 (16), 20 (30), 10 (22)
Heat 2: 22 (23), 16 (16), 14 (19), 16 (25)
Heat 3: 10 (16), 14 (23), 14 (14), 30 (36)
Heat 4: 18 (27), 18 (23), 14 (14), 16 (15)
Heat 5: 16 (26), 18 (23), 14 (12), 22 (22)
Heat 6: 10 (18), 22 (20), 20 (29), 18 (22)
Heat 7: 16 (16), 18 (20), 22 (26), 12 (11)
Semi 1: 18 (20), 10 (13), 20 (21), 18 (25)
Semi 2: 16 (20), 14 (21), 14 (14), 26 (38)
Final: 20 (19), 18 (27), 14 (26), 14 (22)
What does this show?
- Averaging (mean) scores on a like-for-like basis (all the best scores, all the second best scores and so on) reveal the averages for the round to be 9.3, 6, 2.9 and (hilariously) -0.6. Rather closer to the traditional round scores than last time. Total of averages is 17.6, so still below the amount given in other rounds. On three occasions a player scores more than the 10 points on offer in other rounds.
- More interestingly, the leader going into the round only wins five out of the ten shows. The average lead going into the round is 5.2. The lead of the five players who go into the round as the leader averages at 7.2 (this includes two rather large outliers of 10 and 16), but leads of people who don’t go on to win is only 3.2 which seems an entirely reasonable turnover.
- The most interesting result is the one for the final in which loads of points are scored, but if you were to convert the performances into 10, 6, 4 and 2 would still give broadly the same result (in fact Pete and James would tie on 24 points each).
What does this all prove? Beats me, only that the current system used is more ‘alright’ than ‘not alright,’ and this year’s series had me feeling rather bored which definitely wasn’t the case last year. So let’s instead look at the New Zealand 1990 KF final and possibly the dullest Mental Agility round I can recall seeing. Your ten seconds of concentration starts… now!
“You bring the sunshine, I’ll bring the good times”
Something something something, blame it on the boogie.
Anyone think the capital letters on that “numbers whose first letter is the same as the last letter” was a little too much of a giveaway?
I thought the same thing.
That’s what I call a ‘race against time’ question – the sequence is pretty obvious, it’s just a question of whether you can work it out in your remaining 15 seconds. We’ve had a number of these in the past, including one on reversible numbers in series 1.
On the other hand, I think the question would be too subtle without the final capital letter. We do try to put clues into the questions so that they get it right…
With that one, I was wondering if that was a question that might be one difficulty level with the last-letter clue and a higher difficulty level without the clue – but it was used here in its easier form because the final is full of harder sort-of-similar questions already.
In short, I don’t think it would work because numerical sequences are notoriously general so there has to be something to make the sequence ‘interesting’.
The OEIS says that there are 12 ways of continuing that sequence. http://www.research.att.com/njas/sequences/index.html?q=19%2C28%2C38&language=english&go=Search
None of which start with 19, so I think you’re unique among natural numbers. (From memory, doesn’t the OEIS only consider sequences start with one?)
A pathological team could answer, say, 113 and claim 113 for fitting the sequence “Roots of the equation (x-19)(x-28)(x-38)(x-113)=0” (for general values of 113) but I think Victoria could just declare that to be pointless jibba-jabba derived from an insufficiently interesting series.
Starting sequences from midway through is something OC has and does do, though… To the point that there are times teams take the second clue purely to know which direction the sequence is going after figuring out what the sequence is on the first.
That’s actually an interesting point – David, if a team worked out the correct sequence from the first clue and gave what would have been the correct answer but in the opposite to the intended direction, would that be accepted?
I don’t think it should be, any more than ‘this is valid for these two clues but the third makes it not valid’ should in the first round – Buzzing before all the clues are revealed is a bit of a gamble. Otherwise you’re basically accepting any possible sequence/connection from the current clues, rather than requiring a specific sequence/connection (Or at least, one that fits all three/four clues, including the unrevealed ones) which would be daft.
(Incidentally, David – Someone’s wondering elsewhere on the net if you’d have accepted World Wide Web for the £2 coin question.)
Chris: sequences don’t have to start at the start, so that’s not the main point. The official rule goes:
“Each set of clues should have only one feasible answer. In exceptional circumstances, however, a team may believe they have offered another equally justifiable answer after all three clues have been revealed. In this situation we will stop recording and seek independent verification. If the challenge is valid the Presenter will pick up the game with words like “That’s not the answer I was looking for – but that’s another equally good answer – so you get the points”. Any such challenge must be submitted before the programme moves on to the next question.”
…so it depends on what you count as ‘feasible’ but I think it’s fairly clear what’s an elegant connection and what isn’t. The main point is that the should be as equally clever as the one we’d intended.
To be safe, most numerical sequences we do have either an extra clue built into them (e.g. 9ct, 14ct, 18ct…) or a very unusual set of numbers (e.g. the infamous 8, 8000000000, 8000000008…)
Brig: that’s part of the gamble of buzzing in early. However, I do try wherever possible to make sure that the sequence is fixed after the penultimate clue (i.e. after clue 3 in Round 1, clue 2 in Round 2).
Giz: I think we would have done, at a push. We had “Wires” and “Network cable” down on the script, but I think WWW is sufficiently close. It at least it demonstrates that they know, or are guessing at, the right concept even though it’s technically not quite the same thing.