#thecrapshotbracket

[wordpressvip]

Meet our VIP: Enfys Book!

It's time for another round of Meet Our VIPs, where we introduce the amazing people who make up WordPress VIP!

Meet Enfys Book (they/them), Onboarding Technical Account Manager from Maryland, USA! They've been with Automattic and WordPress VIP since May 2019 (over 4 years!) Q: What is your role at WPVIP? I help our customers onboard to the platform and ensure their launches go smoothly. Q: What's your favorite thing about working for Automattic? Automattic is an amazing place to work because they truly value their employees. Our benefits are fantastic, and our approach to almost everything seems to be "trust people," "help each other," and "we're all on the same team." The people I work with are all committed to giving our customers a great experience and making our solution the best it can be. (Shameless plug: come work with us!)

Q: What's your favorite non-WPVIP brand at Automattic? I mean...Tumblr, obvs. Is this a trick question? Q: At Automattic, we have a LOT of "fun" Slack channels. What's your favorite? I run the VIP Music League, which is a themed playlist-building club with some light competition involved. Our Slack channel for the league is great for sharing new music and congratulating the winners of each round, and I love sharing music with folks I may not work with every day. It's a great way to get to know your colleagues. (You can start your own music league at musicleague.com) Q: What's your favorite word and why? "Oubliette" has such great mouthfeel, and it gets bonus points because I learned it from the movie "Labyrinth," which is one of my all-time favorite films.

Q: What's your favorite fandom? LoadingReadyRun. They're Canadian comedy streamers with an amazing online community. My favorite LRR things are these super-short sketches called Crapshots (CW for gun sound and imagery as part of the branding at the beginning and end of each sketch.) They've made hundreds of them, and once they had 512 of them a fan created a single-elimination tournament to find the best Crapshot (@thecrapshotbracket) I was extremely devoted to voting in every single round. They've also raised millions of dollars for Child's Play Charity through their annual multi-day streaming telethon called Desert Bus for Hope.

Q: What's your biggest claim to fame? I'm briefly visible in Britney Spears' "Behind the Music" episode, because I was helping with her autograph signing at the Mall of America in 1998.

Q: Who would win in a fight: giant pizza, aliens, or crabs? Why? Crabs, 100%. Carcinization comes for us all. Q: What are your hobbies outside of work? I'm in a weird band called the Misbehavin' Maidens (@misbehavinmaidens) that sings funny, filthy, feminist, fandom folk music. I'm also a published author in the "metaphysical nonfiction" space. I'm currently working on three more books to be published in the next couple of years.

Learn more about Enfys

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[swagbirddragoln-blog]

Explanation of Prediction/Ranking Algorithms

During the weeks that the crapshot bracket has been running, I have put together a spreadsheet that uses the results of each match up to both predict future match ups and rank each crapshot based on those results. Before I post the results of these algorithms, I thought I’d give an explanation of how they work.

Prediction

In order to predict the percentage of votes each crapshot will receive in each match up what I do is take the average percentage of votes it received in previous matchups -50% and divide that by the sum of the average number of votes received by both crapshots in the matchup -100%. So if we have two crapshots matching up and one has averaged 60% and the other 75%, what you end up with is (0.75-0.50)/(0.60+0.75-1.00) for the higher averaging crapshot. Simplifying that down, we get 0.25/0.35 which is approx 0.714 or 71.4%. If we run the same calculation in the other direction, we get 0.10/0.35 which is approx 0.286 or 28.6%.

The other important properties of this algorithm are what would happen if both crapshots have the exact same average and what would happen in the most extreme possible case. In the event of equal averages, it doesn’t matter what the number is, the equation will spit out exactly 0.50 or 50%. If you look at the equation we might write this case as (a-0.50)/(a+a-1.00) where a is the average. This can be simplified to (a-0.50)/(2a-1.00) which is equal to (a-0.50)/2(a-0.50), and then you can simplify out the (a-0.50) from the top and bottom, leaving 1/2 which is 0.50 or 50%. The other extreme is where one crapshot averages very close to 50% and the other 100%. If that were to happen, the equation would be (1.00-0.50)/(1.00+0.50-1.00) which simplifies to 0.50/0.50 which equals 1.00 or 100%. So this algorithm will always predict a number between 0.50 and 1.00 for the winning crapshot. 

Ranking

The only information we have to work with is that each crapshot is definitely better than the one it defeated and how much it defeated it by. What I went with was to assign each crapshot a point value based on how many points the crapshot it lost to had and how much it lost by. Part of this is also assigning an arbitrary number of points to the winning crapshot. It doesn’t matter what this value is, as any change to it is reflected exactly in all the other crapshots (ie. If I double this value, all the other crapshots are doubled in value) so it will not affect the order. 

The algorithm I use sets the ratio of the two point values equal to the ratio between the amount of votes received. As an example, if the winning crapshot in a match up had 75% of the votes and had 3 points, then the loser of that match up will receive 1 point. What percentage of the winner’s points the loser is to receive is calculated by taking 1 divided by the winner’s percentage of the votes and subtracting 1. Then multiply that by the number of points, and you have the points earned by the loser. That gives the following equation P(1/w-1) where P is the point value and w is the winner’s percentage. That can be simplified to P/w-P. To reuse the above example, it would be filled in as 3/.75-3 which is equal to 4-3 which is equal to 1. 

Once this algorithm has been applied to every match up, ranking order is simply determined by sorting the crapshots from highest points to lowest. In the event of a tie, the one which was eliminated later in the bracket will be placed higher.

I will be posting highlights of my results after each round of the crapshot bracket, and the full results after it has finished.

[themrphlip]

Crapshot Bracket Stats week 4

A day late, but all the same, it's been a week, which means it's time to try to wring some interesting stats out of this pile of numbers from @thecrapshotbracket.

The main defining feature of a Crapshot is, naturally, the short length. However, longer Crapshots have proven more popular, with the longer Crapshot of each matchup winning 59% of the time. Crapshots that last for longer than a minute, in particular, have won 60% of their appearances.

Last week, James was the most popular regular castmember, with Beej behind by a fraction of a percent. This week, Beej has crawled ahead, with 71.8% to James's 71.4%. The imperceptably close race furthers conspiracy theories that Beej and James are actually the same person.

Another stat that has changed since its last appearance here is that fans are starting to prefer newer Crapshots to old ones. The more recent Crapshot in each matchup has won 65% of the time. Crapshots from Volume 1 have slid down to a mere 20% showing. Crapshots that have the new 10-second endcard animation after the honk are also doing well, with a 74% winrate, though I'm not sure whether to attribute that to "newer" or "longer".

Some more rapid-fire stats: Crapshots that feature injury are ahead, winning 68%, but Crapshots that feature death are far behind, winning merely 22%. The punchline of a character calling 911 is very unpopular, losing all 4 of its appearances to date. Also unpopular are Crapshots that include a callback to earlier Crapshots (not counting Crapshots that are part of an explicit sub-series), which have only won 1 of their 4 apparances so far... possibly due to them appearing out of order in the poll, and thus potentially appearing before the Crapshot they are calling back to.

And in the most shocking statistic of all, Crapshots have still maintained a perfect 50% win rate, as by a bizzare coincidence, every time a Crapshot has appeared in the poll, it has been paired against another Crapshot. This makes it the only stat being tracked so far that has appeared exclusively in mirror matches. You would think that at some point there would have been a Crapshot that went up against a non-Crapshot entrant, but so far it hasn't happened. Personally, I think this is too unlikely to be a coincidence, and I think the bracket may be rigged to only pair Crapshots up against each other. What nefarious purpose this serves, I have yet to figure out.

[themrphlip]

Crapshot Bracket Stats week 2

Another week of @thecrapshotbracket has come and gone, so let's see how those statistics are doing.

Team Go Left has lost ground, plummeting to a 39% winrate – the Crapshot on the right winning 3 out of every 5 matchups.

Volume 1 is also losing ground, winning merely 21% of their matchups, not counting the three Vol 1 mirror matches that have occurred. And this is despite getting an average of nearly 40% of the votes in its matchups. You see, this is why we need Proportional Representation, the electorate system is biasing the House against the Vol 1 representatives, who are... wait, I think I might be going off on the wrong track here.

Voters take pride in the things they feel they had a hand in. Crapshots that have been featured on the Crapshoot streams have won 4 out of 5 appearances so far, with a massive average of 63% of the vote.

Andy has continued his 100% streak from last week. To be fair, this wasn't particularly in doubt, as he didn't appear in any of the crapshots from the second week of voting. But still, his dominance is to be respected.

All three Crapshots in the Common Miner trilogy, and both episodes in the Just Chattin' pair have come and gone, with none of them making it through the first round. Press Ⓕ to pay respects to these series, never to be seen again.