(I’m posting under a new ID, because I made the mistake of revising my profile to change my email to a non-valid address. Of course the BB software immediately locked down the account, and fired off a new account-activation email to “spamlessatnospamdotcom”. :-/ ).
What I was getting at is simply that, as posted, this competition tells everyone what the really amazingly expert LD-ers can manage, but not what might be a more typical, realistically attainable performance level for more “ordinary” LD-ers. This could easily be a little discouraging, especially to those of us who are struggling to master LD skills to some sort of consistent performance level.
So I was suggesting that – along with the winners’ names and scores, that the average score of all the contestants be posted as well (perhaps in a second column, beside the winning scores).
For example;
Jan '05 - John Smith 18, (all-contestants avg 3.2 )
Jan '05 - Jane Doe 48, … (all-contestants avg 4.1 )
would indicate that while John Smith won the January contest by having (or at least reporting ) 18 LDs, the average score of all who entered the contest was quite a bit lower – there must have been a fair number of people who only had 1 or 2 LDs that month. The winning score for Febuary is higher, but the average would appear to indicate (in this example) to be mainly due to the fact that Jane Doe is a phenomenal performer.
In fact, it would be pretty neat to show not only the monthly mean (“mathematical” average ie. total scores divided by number of contestants), but also the median (score that has 1/2 of contestants scoring higher than, 1/2 of them lower than) and the mode ( the commonest score of the contestants).
Now that I think of it, maybe, to encourage broader participation of those attending the LD4all forum, this could be done as a seperate “LD Frequency Survey” thread instead of just a competition. But even if all that is too much work, just recording the mean average as well as the top score in the contest thread would be easy enough, and could be pretty interesting.