What would Bo Derek say?

[acroyear]

Slashdot | New Olympics Scoring: No More Perfect 10.0:

"If you watch the Olympics gymnastics this year, you may be confused by the new scoring system which will let athletes score 14, 17, or even higher. The new rules are 'heavy on math' and employ two panels of judges: one for technical difficulty, which adds points up from a score of zero; the other for execution and technique, which starts at 10.0 and subtracts for errors. The two numbers are then combined for the final score. As one judge put it, 'The system rewards difficulty. But the mistakes are also more costly.' The new rules were adopted after South Korea protested a scoring at the 2004 Olympics."

I'm a bit annoyed by the "heavy on math" comment (which was in the original article). It may use a lot of arithmetic, but adding points for difficulty, subtracting points from 10 for execution, and adding 2 numbers together is hardly "math". Arithmetic, yes, but not math.

A 10 Isn’t Necessarily Perfect in New Scoring System for Gymnastics - NYTimes.com:

Nastia Liukin of the United States team, for example, performs a routine on the uneven bars that has a sky-high difficulty value of 7.7. Her father and coach, Valeri Liukin, crunched numbers last year to invent the complex, high-scoring routine.

He did the calculations on a Post-it before handing it to his daughter at practice one day. She gasped.

I rest my case. Even complex physics math estimation require a whole restaurant napkin or at least the back of a business envelope (just ask Feynman).  A mere Post-it note can only be lite maths.

Comments

"math"

[slycreations.livejournal.com]

Well... if you stop to consider that most folks can't (1) figure out their share of the dinner tab or (2) calculate a proper tip -- it's no wonder they consider the new scoring system as "math".

The planet is peopled with idiots.