But come inside for a real mathematical look at WSL judging!
(I lurv u beechgirt readers. I reely do an its not jes the vodka typing. I meanitis butt i also do. Like, reed this ledder her. Woh wood tak this mulch time? Only u! Becuz u rooool and can do maths. I cant. At all. Bet jes lookit this! It goooood. Suriously. From Parick Brewster who I enven luv mor then u becuz…becuz… Well. just reed hiz maths!)
Add me to the club. I hate Chas Smith. I hate the man for two reasons.
Reason 1: An electric version of his book is $14.99 (ridiculous) (2 b honess that sux. U shudd hav bot the paperbak from austrltia becuz my pichur is on the new one (COMING AUGUST 1!))
Reason 2: For what he has forced me to do with my spare time for the past several weeks.
After reading the article “Revolution: Let’s dump the judges” I (idiotically) took it upon myself to see if “a system of speed, torque, amount of time in the air, number of spins in the air, amount of time in the barrel” was possible, or, better yet, if it already existed – if only in the ether.
I took on this moronic and thankless project because I am of the firm belief that competitive surfing needs an element of objectivity if it is to become respected. As it stands, the knower of all things (Wikipedia) defines surfing as “a surface water sport in which the wave rider, referred to as a surfer, rides on the forward or deep face of a moving wave, which is usually carrying the surfer towards the shore.”
This is a stark contrast to something like basketball which “is a sport, generally played by two teams of five players on a rectangular court. The objective is to shoot a ball through a hoop 18 inches (46 cm) in diameter and 10 feet (3.048 m) high mounted to a backboard at each end.”
Such objectivity! Such order, justice, and beauty!
It irritates me to no end that there is no true definition of surfing. The feeling I get when someone who floundered on a soft-top claims to have ‘surfed’ is similar to one I had couple years ago:
(Bare with me, I promise it will come full circle.)
I was in my final semester of college wrapping up an, all to easy in retrospect, degree in economics at my overpriced private alma mater. The school had recently been accused of ‘rigging’ the college rankings in large part by accepting rich foreign students who paid full-freight but whose grades and test scores, which were often sub-par, did not factor into the ranking equation.
I was settling down in front of one of the library’s computers, hoping that its stats program would be able to find some correlation robust enough for me to write a 20-page paper and graduate. Naturally, the stats program I was working on crashed and failed to reopen.
I moved to the adjacent computer and began work there. After a few minutes, a tall, skinny, Chinese guy who I recognized from my final class sat down next to me. When I leaned over and told him that the program was broken on that computer he looked back at me blankly. “The math program is broken on that computer,” I said again.
“English?” he replied, with a confounded expression.
I slowly reiterated, “The pro-gram for the MAAATH is bro-ken,” before deciding to let him figure it out on his own.
As far as I know, him and me earned the same piece paper. Just as a person on an 8’ soft-top hopelessly flapping while being sucked out to sea is also ‘surfing’.
I never would have imagined that I would return to the same library, to the same computer, two years later to answer Chas’s call. (Fuk thatguy!)
The process began by going through each wave of finals day of the Fiji pro and logging some objective aspects of the each wave (# of turns, tube time, etc.) along with the score. In reality it took maybe two hours tops, but between cursing Chas’s name (Its dumb! Who call himself CHAD CHAS? Fukin retard!) and beer breaks it felt eternal. Spreadsheet in proverbial hand, I plugged the numbers into a stats program and voilà, a hideous, premature, wave-scoring model is born.
Without further ado, I present to you with the equation for finals day of the Fiji pro:
1.08516362*(# of top turns) + 1.057755641*(Seconds of tube time)+ 2.259198138(if completed) – .63
In words: each top turn added 1.08 points to a wave score. Each second (measured in the very scientific ‘one thousand’ system) of tube time added 1.06 points. Add 2.26 for completing a wave. Then subtract .63.
Using just 3 variables (#of top turns, tube time, and completion) we can explain 70% of the score (69.6258% to be precise) which is pretty damn good. With enough time and beer, someone could log wave size, airtime, etc., and the model could get much, much better. Maybe good enough for a robot judge. We could name it Chas.
Cheers,
PB
(Parrtick Bruwstur)
