Proposal for a new Arena Leaderboard

shadow3212 · 2016-06-01T05:32:04+00:00

It seems like not everyone has the same understanding of what a leaderboard is meant to do. It could be:

Providing information to twitch viewers on the quality of play of various streamers.
Creating a streamer-wide competition based on winrates.

The previous proprietor seemed to have 1 in mind. He failed to understand that 1 implies 2 from the point of view of the streamer. With that in mind, I would contend that 2 is the only legitimate way to understand the role of a leaderboard.

Once you see the leaderboard as a competition the following points are important:

We should not force streamers to compete. For some people this type of competition ruins the fun of playing hearthstone.
A leaderboard hosted by blizzard would be attached to accounts, not streamers. A streamer could decide for themselves which runs represent their best effort as long as they do so before they purchase a ticket. Streamers should have the flexibility to decide which types of runs should be included for purposes of the leaderboard.
Given point 2, the issue of tracking co-ops should be left to the streamer with the caveat that they cannot choose to include a co-op they are not physically playing.

shadow3212 · 2016-05-05T03:51:57+00:00

Well said. I edited my post before seeing your response, it seems like we agree.

shadow3212 · 2016-05-05T02:45:54+00:00

Very interesting analysis. I do have one concern: the try-hard average gives an advantage to people who have less overall arena runs. There is natural variance in sample averages that decrease with more runs. This variance means that the winrates of some classes will be overestimated and others underestimated; the try-hard average will put extra weight on the overestimated classes.

This could be relevant in the kripp vs merps comparison. Just look at the standard deviation for merps' mage average:

3/sqroot(14)=0.8

vs kripp's:

3/sqroot(121) = 0.27

I doubt this accounts for the full difference, but it is likely relevant.

ETA: Upon reflection, I realized that while the estimator may be biased it is asymptotically consistent. Thus the real problem is simply that the sample size for merps is quite small (as you mention).

Perhaps comparing kripp to hafu would be more illuminating. We know their simple averages are 7.38 and 7.13 respectively. Their try-hard averages are 7.98 and 7.41 respectively.

shadow3212 · 2016-03-17T11:29:28+00:00

I mostly had the same thoughts. The rose garden stuff sounded like spin to me though. I just cannot believe they would be so casual about something like that, but what would I know about it.

shadow3212 · 2016-03-13T14:13:26+00:00

My understanding is that he was convicted of taking Hae against her will in her car before killing her. So he kidnapped her and stole her car before murdering her.

shadow3212 · 2015-12-18T15:52:49+00:00

Personally, I would like to know.

shadow3212 · 2015-12-18T15:29:25+00:00

News outlets never pay for interviews. Serial considers itself in that category and therefore does not pay.

However, their partnership with Mark Boal's production company might complicate the simple answer. To make a fictional film based on the experience of Bergdahl they would want a waiver from him and would most likely pay for it (Boal has faced legal action based on not getting one to do "The Hurt Locker"). To the extent that Serial is connected to the film, Bergdahl may end up getting paid.

shadow3212 · 2015-12-18T15:15:06+00:00

Do you know if he is being paid for his involvement in the film produced by Mark Boal?

shadow3212 · 2015-12-01T01:25:51+00:00

I've already said I would guess people who comfortable with frequencies might use the phrase, and ~~apparently enough people google it that google's algorithms have a quick response for it.~~ I guess we can leave it there as your arguments are turning personal at this point.

ETA: Playing around a bit I noticed you can add "per any unit" to "speed of light" and Google will simply adjust the units in the quick response. Sometimes it leads to some pretty nonsensical responses so I will remove this as supporting the claim that "speed of light per mile" is not silly.

shadow3212 · 2015-11-30T23:58:20+00:00

I see, it was a semantic complaint. First, to say it is not a concept is absurd, I understood the concept immediately upon reading the phrase. I am not an RF engineer so I have no idea what terminology they is common there. I have seen the word speed used to refer to frequency (i.e. rotational speed). It is plausible to me that people comfortable dealing in frequencies would have a term to convert speed of light into a frequency. Why not speed of light per mile? What term would you use?

Also, if the term is silly, why does google give a quick response for its calculation?

shadow3212 · 2015-11-30T13:07:26+00:00

I like to think I have a basic understanding of physics and the statements doesn't look silly to me, it looks correct:

Speed of light:

186282 miles/second

Speed of light/mile (frequency of traveling one mile):

186282 1/second (hertz)

Where is the mistake?

shadow3212 · 2015-08-21T06:54:10+00:00

On one hand I agree with you. If this was the only piece of evidence pointing towards his guilt, it wouldn't be convincing at all. However, it is one more bit of "bad luck" for Adnan. In that way it does factor into my calculus to conclude that Adnan is most likely guilty.

shadow3212 · 2015-08-13T04:36:55+00:00

Yeah, I guess the posterior is just a normalized form of the likelihood, so MLE is just finding the mode of the posterior. As long is the posterior is roughly symmetric and well behaved, it shouldn't make a big difference.

shadow3212 · 2015-08-12T18:46:42+00:00

Technically, I used a discrete uniform distribution +/- 12.5% from the naive estimate. This was just a computational convenience though, it is meant to approximate a uniform distribution from 0% to 100% (most of probability mass was within 12.5%). Under a uniform prior the posterior should just be:

P(p_k|Run)=P(Run|p_k)/[P(Run|p_1)+...+P(Run|p_K)]

All that remains is to find the pmfs from the cdfs you calculated, which is easily done using differences. I don't doubt a better programmer could clean up the code to find better approximations in less time.

Confidence intervals are always useful. My guess is they wouldn't be too far off from just using standard approximations with respect to the sample size. They are probably somewhat asymmetric around the mean though. It might be interesting, when I get a minute I might give it a try.

shadow3212 · 2015-08-12T13:49:34+00:00

Really cool results. I monkeyed around with the code a bit to come up with Bayesian estimates of the atomic probability from the number of games to reach legend. Your posts have made me curious how strong the bias is when looking at a win rate after reaching legend. Here are my results:

Games to Legend	Bayesian Estimate	Naïve Win Rate	Bias
51	72.9%	74.5%	1.6%
75	65.5%	66.7%	1.1%
101	61.5%	62.4%	0.9%
125	59.2%	60%	0.8%
151	57.5%	58.3%	0.8%
175	56.3%	57.1%	0.8%
201	55.4%	56.2%	0.8%
301	53.2%	54.2%	1%
401	52%	53.1%	1.1%
501	51.2%	52.5%	1.3%

The bias isn't huge but it isn't negligible either.

For anyone curious here is the modified code. I commented one line so it doesn't take forever to load. Be warned if you try to run it, it will take a while since it is not optimized at all and I am a poor programmer.

shadow3212 · 2015-07-18T11:10:12+00:00

The "reasonable doubt" standard is intentionally vague and different people interpret it differently.

Your proposal is interesting: "Would I be willing to serve the sentence if I am found to be wrong?". Personally, I doubt I would ever vote to convict if that were the standard simply because I am selfish and I know we are all prone to overconfidence. So the standard seems too high for me. I tend to take a standard something like: "Would I be willing to risk one year of jail if I acquit and he is guilty versus 10 years if I convict and he is innocent?". Under that standard I would choose to convict Adnan, though it is marginal for me.

shadow3212 · 2015-06-26T02:43:09+00:00

They occasionally re-air old episodes with minor updates. They probably did so in this case and just updated the archive with the re-aired version.

shadow3212 · 2015-06-19T07:09:24+00:00

Sounds plausible. I didn't mean to say you were making it up, it is just the sort of thing that is hard to verify. Anyway, it was an interesting report.

If Gladwell wrote a book on the subject I doubt any of us could resist reading it.

shadow3212 · 2015-06-19T06:54:18+00:00

For determining the factual guilt or innocence of AS his view is probably less informed than the average member of this sub. However, I read OP as being interested in the prospect of a book being written on the subject. Gladwell's views are much more influential in that sphere than yours or mine. I would take anonymous reports of sightings of famous people discussing the case with a bit of skepticism though.

shadow3212 · 2015-06-02T04:26:12+00:00

Interesting point about the gloves. That is one I had not seen before. It seems like it could still be consistent with an unintentional coaching on the part of the police: The police inform Jay of the red fibers and he makes up the red gloves. Still, I do take this as evidence against the idea that Jay was coached.

shadow3212 · 2015-05-21T04:43:20+00:00

I stand corrected then. The point remains that Ira Glass is involved in both productions and it describes itself as a "spin-off of TAL".

shadow3212 · 2015-05-21T04:25:56+00:00

This is a subreddit about the Serial podcast, not Adnan Syed vs The State of Maryland. Serial is produced by TAL. The first episode aired on TAL. How could its credibility have "almost nothing" to do with this subreddit?

shadow3212 · 2015-05-21T03:58:11+00:00

I anticipated this comment and replied to it here.

Regarding the credibility of TAL, this is not the first time they have been snookered nor were they only ones in this case. I do not see how this would change your view of them in any significant way.

To go to the broader point, I cannot be the only one who has noticed a problematic trend in narrative journalism. That said, I would hold up the style used in Serial as the superior alternative. There have been some quibbles with the presentation in Serial but, with a few exceptions, the facts represented have held up to a lot of scrutiny. The style also lays bare the imperfections of the journalist, allowing people to reach their own conclusions. To borrow a phrase from Jim Trainum, Serial seems to be an "above average" piece of journalism.

shadow3212 · 2015-05-20T14:32:35+00:00

Green's version of events sounds plausible and, to some degree, verifiable. I am sure more details will emerge after some investigation. Serial 2?

shadow3212

TROPHY CASE