by curt » Thu Aug 02, 2012 8:17 pm
I agree that it can be frustrating to have to pick between two pretty weak images when you hate them both equally. And similarly frustrating to have to pick between two really strong images that each have great qualities, or two radically different images that are both strong in what they are trying to convey. But keep in mind that the results are averaged statistically over 1000's or 10's of thousands of individual contests. We have had over 12,000 mini contests (pairings) so far in just the first 24 hours. So it shouldn't hurt the process by very much if a voter makes a mistake, or can't decide and throws up their hands and makes an arbitrary choice.
For those that enjoy watching international soccer tournaments, they usually start out with round robin play. In our case a "match" costs very little, so conceptually imagine all the teams in a single giant group playing endless matches between each other where each match randomly selects 2 teams from the group to compete against each other. If a team loses a match (even due to a bad referee), it is not catastrophic because in the course of the tournament, the other strong teams are also likely to lose a few matches due to similar factors. Over some period of time, and thousands of matches the better teams will tend to accumulate a better win/loss record. I may not enjoy watching two lousy teams play for 90 minutes, and I may hate to see two great teams play and have one of them forced to lose. But every team must play every other team (statistically) for the ultimate results to be fair and make sense. And ultimately it is the strongest teams that rise to the top and generally the teams will sort out in the standings very quickly. And then at the end rather than playing a single elimination tournament between the teams that make it through group play, we just use the group standings to determine the winners -- and we can do that because all the teams are in one giant group. (And we can still pull out the best south american team, or the best european team, or the best team that wears long sleeve jerseys, or the best team that wears adidas boots if we want to.)
And at the end if there are 2 images vying for grand champion that are one vote apart and someone makes a voting mistake to swing it one way or another, then that's part of the fun and why we play the game in the first place. We could have easily (well it would have been time consuming) ranked the images ourselves, but we thought this statistical pairing method would be really interesting to try, and I think Gijs had a lot of fun coding it up.
We still keep track of categories so at the end of the voting period we will know the best images in each category, and we will have an overall ranking so we can have an overall winner.