Carnival 2012 Achievement Unlocked

[theschizm]

Kayleigh and I had a great time in Pittsburgh this weekend for Carnival 2012. The whole gang was there, and despite a few hiccups in finding restaurants 10 of us could agree on at a time, we all enjoyed ourselves. Roaming around campus, snagging free food, seeing the not-as-awesome Midway, plenty of fun group gameage, and Kayleigh finally getting

Comments

[gregh1983]

I definitely had a "wait, what?" moment while reading about the Nertz prediction, so thanks for including the algorithm! That story would make a nice little illustration for a math class on the difference between mean and median.

I feel like the basic ("frequentist"/"MLE"?) approach in this case would be to use the mean, like you're now doing, but I can make arguments for it either way. The goal of the median would be to not get unduly biased by extreme play intervals, which sounds nice, but it breaks down when you have a really bimodal distribution like you have with Nertz.

Aw, we should have played XYZ just once more! That's a nice group game :-)

[theschizm]

Yeah, and Nertz wasn't the only offender. Any game I played twice in rapid succession and then not at all after that was showing up way too early, and there were several. My algorithm optimistically thought, "Oh man, they're due any time now, then we're golden!"

I'm glad XYZ was a hit, especially since the team rules were made up on the fly!

To see what has already hit the quarter mark, you can check out this up-to-date list including comments and usually-personal pictures (Greg, you appear in two, back-to-back, somehow). I just reached my 25th Airships play with Kayleigh today!