 addison
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Posted: 15 April 2010, 6:39 AM
Buttefly loops can be dangerous.
(1) Mismatch of control descriptions and maps do occur. To minimise the risk of having incorrect control descriptions compared to the map (which has happened, even at European Champs level) you basically have to go without control descriptions.
(2) People often set buttefly loops in the wrong part of courses. Should they be early on, midway through or towards the end?
(3) If you have A & B variations only, should you go ABABAB etc or should it be random AABABBABAAABABB? Basically if you go ABABABAB systematically you are in effect increasing the start time. Why not just increase the start time?
The only really fair way is to mass start. Everyone seemed to enjoy the mass start we did on the final day at Queens Birthday last year, we did loops to help split people up early on (wrongly or rightly perhaps looking back it should have been mid course) but it was well received. But people complain if you make it mass start, and numbers declined a bit as well.
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nick
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Posted: 15 April 2010, 11:53 AM
Another fair way is to have massive start intervals eg: 10 minutes. If you get caught by 10 minutes you should be out of the top 5, even if you get a tow through the rest of the course (same principle as Keith outlined earlier). Unfortunately this isn't very practical...
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Tane Cambridge
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Posted: 16 April 2010, 4:46 AM
I think you need to be careful with setting the butterfly loops unlike the long at QBday last year where one of the loops took about 3 mins to do yet the start intervals were set at 3 mins.
So for example I started 3 mins ahead of Michael Adams, I had the short loop first and he the long loop. I did the first loop in just over 3mins and saw Michael heading out on the first of his long loop as I reached the pivot again. Therefore in this case having the butterfly loops actually encouraged following...unfair following too...on the loop instead of breaking packs up like its supposed to....
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pcbrent
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Posted: 16 April 2010, 5:05 AM
No system is perfect hence I think ideally have several systems.
I personally like a combination of ranked start and a butterfly loops.
Of course will need to invent a fancy ranking system that gets updated after say each A-Grade event, even different rankings for each race distance, sprint, middle and long seeing different people seem to perform better in different distances.
Is this getting to complicated?
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addison
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Posted: 16 April 2010, 8:18 AM
Ranked start lists are also good because it stops people starting last who are walking the whole course just to get their moneys worth and ending up being the last out for 2+ hours over anyone else
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fraser
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Posted: 16 April 2010, 10:11 AM
The Norwegian Orienteering Federation completed an extensive report on this matter. Follow the links from here:
http://news.worldofo.com/2010/02/18/dead-running-separating-method-for-the-future/
I say there is nothing like a good booze-o to sort out the men from the boys.
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Greg
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Posted: 16 April 2010, 10:34 AM
Surely the best way for ranking start lists to work is having the best start first, therefore decreasing the chance of the people catching the person staring in front of them because they are supposedly better
Agree with Brents comments about ranking list, surely the NZOF database archiver (statistician) could write a program right out of the back blocks of 1960's computer graphics.
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rob.g
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Posted: 16 April 2010, 1:36 PM
Hey Fraser, When Neil comes comes back we'll have the world booze-o. Marquita will set and I'll control, and no Simon's allowed.
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Paul I
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Posted: 17 April 2010, 8:55 AM
i suspect Neil has been training well back in the motherland, mind you he might be thrown off course by some steinlarger rather than the poofy boddingtons or whatever he's practicing with
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SJ
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Posted: 19 April 2010, 1:04 PM
That's ridiculous Rob. You can't hold a World Champs and then not invite the Georgious of booze-o
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Bryan
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Posted: 20 April 2010, 2:37 AM
Just back from a bout of sickness and fever.
'How relevant are rankings from 5 years ago':
Last rankings compiled: http://www.orienteeringresults.com/O/nzof/MostRecentRankings.asp
Yes, that's a looooong time ago - actually 7 years and 23 days to be precise. New rankings coming in the next few weeks after many hours work.
Included in the new rankings will be the following:
- overall M21E, W21E (same as previous)
- top M21E, W21E in sprint
- top M21E, W21E in middle
- top M21E, W21E in long (or events advertised as long even though they ended up being middleish)
Don't hold your breadth or drool waiting for this as it will take some time. I have to reorder my card punches and add some new cards
and then run it through the card reader:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card
I can always remember watching my father do complicated arithmetic on his abacus faster than someone else on a calculator.
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Michael
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Posted: 20 April 2010, 8:30 AM
Bryan I'm ashamed of you. A real forest man would use logs. http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=zTMAAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=logarithms+7-figure&source=bl&ots=PVB4L9MBcu&sig=E2xcSRwySB-J8OODin3tTOCzGnk&hl=en&ei=5Q_NS4GmCIK6swPyw82vDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CBcQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false
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Bryan
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Posted: 20 April 2010, 10:17 AM
I have to confess - I've never used logs. I have actually used punch cards programming in machine code though. Who remembers the TRS 80 and PDP 11?
Ah, to go back to the days when life was simple and orienteering was searching for buckets tied to trees.
I have just presented a paper which included the following:
Oracle Fusion MapViewer, Spatial, replication, converting of coordinates, HTTP server, Apache, OC4J, Jdeveloper, JRuby, Ruby on Rails, Java, J2EE, JDBC, PL/SQL.
Take me away from the land of acronyms and 4 letter words and dump me in a forest somewhere please...
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