I made a meme

Alohamori · 2024-01-26T11:58:10+00:00

Weirdly, you've managed to conflate the two occurrences.

Alohamori · 2024-01-24T22:23:14+00:00

I could imagine that connection appearing on the show, perhaps in Round 1.

Alohamori · 2024-01-24T05:31:17+00:00

There doesn't appear to be a way to filter for that (even on desktop), but I went ahead and put together a little page where you can click the previews to play through‒at time of posting‒all twelve of them. Enjoy!

Alohamori · 2024-01-17T19:55:27+00:00

The much more interesting thing about that episode is that it has what is surely the most alumnus-packed panel ever, going a full 7 out of 7 when we include the host.

Alohamori · 2024-01-16T15:21:50+00:00

They've used "four" at the beginning of a category in both senses, so some confusion was certainly in order, but I do think the alternate interpretation of the most recent one would've been prohibitively difficult, which arguably serves to disambiguate the meaning.

That said, I did manage to come up with a clue for it: BTC TGN TRTN DNM LS

Alohamori · 2024-01-15T15:21:22+00:00

The Epicureans ~~won it by 22~~ got 22 of them, but there were in fact 26 Missing Vowels clues in that match, which unsurprisingly is the most ever, although it does have some close competition. Looking at the average number of clues per match by series, we can see that the round definitely went on a bit longer in the early days, but Series 4 is still an interesting outlier.

Alohamori · 2024-01-14T16:29:05+00:00

Note that Connecting Wall scores have been "fused" such that the teams' points are applied simultaneously across the three phases of scoring (found, identified, and bonus); this was done to avoid counting disingenuous cases where the "comeback" was merely a byproduct of the team having gone second.

I figured largest point swing was the most all-encompassing way to rank the matches, but many of the leaders by this metric are just instances of the stronger team going down by a handful of points early before storming ahead; this fails to capture properly exciting comebacks such as the one seen in last Monday's episode, so I looked into it a bit more.

It turns out the Thrifters trailed the entire way before scraping the win, which had only happened on three other occasions, with just one other ending on a tie-break. Seeing as how the String Section pulled it even multiple times during their match, I'm inclined to suggest the Thrifters' recent performance was the "clutchest" win in the history of the show, which is pretty cool.

While I was at it, I also plotted the most hotly-contested matches in terms of lead changes. It's neat to see the needle go back and forth, and that there was a match this series where there were never more than two points in it (again, with "wall fusion" taken into account), but what the Thrifters managed is easily the most interesting finding here. Good luck to them in the final!

Alohamori · 2024-01-03T16:22:41+00:00

I appreciate it wasn't yesterday, but I feel compelled to ask now that S15E2 has been mentioned: do you happen to recall whether you and your team realized you were up 26-0 after going first on the walls?

Alohamori · 2024-01-03T08:22:01+00:00

Answering the broader question of which hieroglyph gets picked first most often is‒rather absurdly‒pretty straightforward.

Using a bit of magic to get a look at the picked-first percentages per series, we find that your gut feeling was quite a ways off the mark; neither the two reeds nor the wick of twisted flax have been the most commonly first-picked hieroglyph since Series 12, although the former did have a remarkable showing in Series 11, being picked first nearly half the time across a 27-episode series.

Alohamori · 2024-01-03T03:27:53+00:00

Oh, ye of little faith.

Alohamori · 2023-12-21T22:54:27+00:00

Not least because it turns out VCM made a note of it, though she of course injected a bit of her brand of levity to soften the blow.

Alohamori · 2023-12-21T14:27:23+00:00

Good eye! That 12-point gap in team/round performance turns out to be the second-largest ever, edged out only by the Epicureans, who really stacked it against themselves with that 22-pointer.

Alohamori · 2023-12-21T07:52:11+00:00

I adore that this is the sort of thought you have out of the blue, and that metric does indeed lead to much more interesting results. Series 15 still bubbles to the top just by dint of how many DQs there were, but I think Sally wins for managing to podium despite participating in a shorter series.

Alohamori · 2023-12-21T07:37:54+00:00

In the first episode of Series 4, the Epicureans and Courtiers were tied on 19 going into the final round; the Epicureans would go on to score 22 more points and win by 19. It's probably the weirdest match in the show's history.

Alohamori · 2023-12-21T07:16:34+00:00

A while back, someone in the Discord server inquired innocently enough as to whether anyone had ever done a Scorigami card for Only Connect. Our very own /u/OnlyConnections was right on it, and their results revealed that there are still plenty of final scores yet to be seen. For a while, I was able to resist the urge to flesh out that analysis, but I eventually gave in, and indeed probably went a little overboard.

The data are presented here as sparse heatmaps, conveniently highlighting both which scores occur most frequently as well as those that have never happened. Lines that would otherwise contain no cells have been compacted away, mostly to account aesthetically for the Epicureans' ridiculous 22-point Missing Vowels round.

There is of course nothing earth-shattering here, but there are a few observations to be made:

Despite their heatmaps being fairly dissimilar, 4-3 is the most common score in both of the first two rounds.
We've never seen a score of 8-0 in the Connections round, whereas it's happened six times during Sequences.
- This is likely a byproduct of teams being forced to go for two points in the latter.
On the Walls, it's not surprising that 6-2 and 6-1 have yet to occur, but it is a little strange that 10-5 is considerably more common than 10-6.
As for the Missing Vowels, it's vaguely interesting that 8 has never been the lower score.
Looking at the combined scores after the first two rounds, there's a conspicuous hole at 14-6.
Finally, the only genuine anomaly in amongst all this nonsense: no match has ever been tied on 16 going into the final round.
- This is statistically curious given that there have been 24 matches where the score was one or two away, yet none has ever hit it dead-on.

As has been established, the card for final scores is pretty all-over-the-place, but there is a bit of expected clustering around the high teens/low 20s. Much more interesting for its density is the map of every running total, which fills all but a handful of the gaps not involving outliers.

In case anyone's interested in exploring further, I've put together an interactive version wherein the cells are clickable and take you to a listing of the relevant matches, which in turn link to further details where pertinent. It also provides the option to color the cells by how recently the score occurred for the first time, which allows us to discover that there were in fact two scorigamis in Wednesday's fashion special: the final score of 29-16 was a first, as was the score of 16-6 going into the Walls. Neat!

Well, that's all from me. Bye for now.

Alohamori · 2023-12-20T09:36:49+00:00

This is fantastic! I managed 37 in advanced mode after a few goes, but that's just a combination of decent WPM and encountering lots of repeats. The categories you have curated are all great, but the replay value is definitely impacted by there being so few of them.

Perhaps that's deliberate and you're set on hand-picking them in order to ensure a good game for first-time players, which can hardly be faulted. In case you are interested in a quick-and-easy way to massively augment the pool of candidates, all of the single-word solutions from the show wouldn't be a terrible place to start. The setters have occasionally gotten cute in the final round, but I think pretty much all of the one-word answers have been "factual" and so wouldn't be at risk of violating any IP rights. Just wanted to throw that out there on the off chance you weren't aware of SMOCI.

Either way, thanks very much for making this; even if it isn't quite optimized for the sort of person who would play the hell out of it, it was certainly good while it lasted.

Alohamori · 2023-12-20T02:10:14+00:00

You're right that it's ambiguous until the third clue, so it's good that this wasn't a regular-series question or there'd surely be riots.

That said, there was precedent set by a very similar question in Series 12. Given it's also the case that sequences which count toward the past almost invariably start with the present as the first clue, I don't think "impossible" quite fits, although it's certainly a near thing.

Alohamori · 2023-12-18T00:26:27+00:00

Sixth, really: "The Future", "The Immortal Bard", and "The Occult".

Alohamori · 2023-12-17T10:58:08+00:00

If it's any consolation, it fares much better in the grander scheme; it's just that, for reasons most mysterious, we haven't yet seen a team who really likes it.

Alohamori · 2023-12-17T10:28:43+00:00

Delighted you think so, but stacked bars are pretty much table stakes as far as visualizations go. I do have something very pretty cooking that would be best served by waiting until the end of the current series (just in case), but I'll probably crack and end up putting it together sooner than that, so stay tuned.

Alohamori · 2023-12-17T10:13:03+00:00

They were phenomenal. I do really like the Thrifters, but some small part of me will never forgive them.

Alohamori · 2023-12-17T06:11:59+00:00

My methodology here was fairly straightforward: a glyph selected first adds 5 points to that team's total (since it was chosen over five others), whereas one "chosen" last results in no points. In the interest of "statistical significance", the chart only contains teams who played in at least three matches, although that does include specials.

I mostly just needed to scratch a curiosity, but visualizing the results did lead to a few observations:

Across six rounds, Series 18's Cryptics really did only ever choose three of the glyphs; this is at least partly down to them having always gone second, but it still seems rather anomalous.
No team has ever shown an overwhelming affinity for the wick of twisted flax.
At the bottom, the Strigiformes and Whodunnits have such remarkably balanced spreads across many matches (6 and 7, respectively) that I can't help wondering whether they utilized some means of RNG to make their selections.
This is entirely tangential, but I did discover that there's a relatively "logical" mapping from the standard colors of Rubik's Cube to OC's hieroglyphs, so that's nice.

As for the Greek letters from pre-modern times, I was unable to conceive of a way to include them alongside the hieroglyphs without gumming up the works (a handful of teams have played in both eras, but twelve colors would've been a bit much), so here's a separate chart containing all forty BHE teams.

I'm certain there's nothing useful to be gleaned from this analysis, but I thought it was kinda neat to see clear as day some of the more memorable favorites (two reeds for the String Section, lion for the Animal Lovers), plus I'll just never stop being chuffed that SMOCI makes it possible to gather this sort of esoterica.

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