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- Dec 19, 2009
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I have to thank Steve for a massive effort in analyzing the detailed hole-by-hole #s that I sent him for the four MA1 rounds at Plantation Ruins during the 2012 Worlds (also have to thank BigDawg and the PDGA in sending me all the scorecards).
...The Charlotte DGC recently weighed in with the opinion of WHY change--if players want the super challenging course that beats them into submission they should go 8 miles to play Renny Gold; if they want a fun course with challenges, the current Plantation Ruins course is about where it should be.
#13...Yes, it has a wide scoring spread, but is it for a good reason?
So you can use the synergy discussions to determine if holes are easier/harder based on similar features... so if I took every hole and made a feature list. Left turn, RT, up, down, fast green, open, narrow, tee box length, bench at tee pad, distance of bench to tee pad...etc... you could use this information to infer a lot about what makes up difficulty in DG hole...by assigning attributes to holes you could get a synergy score for 2 hole partners, 3 hole, 4 hole... using a matrix grouping them by shared attributes...?
Does that make sense?
...I am afraid however that a large part of the analysis that revolves around luck/randomness/non-correlation is inherently flawed. The reason I say that is that "skill" is not a homogeneous data-point/variable.
Disc golf skill is made up of Distance, Accuracy, Putting and Course Management (self-awareness of the first 3 skills listed....and decision making based on odds-making of risk/reward choices).
What's a "good reason"? I showed that it does the best job at sorting out these players. What else is a hole supposed to do during Worlds?
If you have a 250 ft hole that looks like a plinko board, with small trees and smallish gaps between them, then you will get a HUGE scoring spread on that hole. Does that make it a good hole because, as you say, "it does the best job at sorting out these players"? Absolutely not.
If you could correlate the actual scores to the known skill of the players (as Chuck did at the course level), then maybe yes. But just scoring spread alone doesn't tell you what you need to know.