If you think about it, if you were to try to select the top 10 competitors in any competition, and any two of them tie, they clearly still fill two spots, even though their rank is equal, so you have to skip over the next number, otherwise you would end up with 11 people in the top 10 (ranked #10 or better), otherwise it wouldn't make much sense. Obviously, in the case of a tie, you could just take people ranked #9 or better, but if you have multiple ties, this number would have to keep changing. This is as much a bookkeeping measure as anything else. When you see that the last person in the top 10 is ranked #10 (or you see two tied for 9th at the end of the list, or 3 tied for 8th, etc), you have less questions than if you ranked the ties equally and continued numbering in order.
For example in this round, say there were 5 ties. The only one you have to worry about noticing is the one at the end, 999. If ranks weren't skipped around ties, the person ranked 998 might think he qualified, but would discover he hadn't, and would be upset and confused, but if his rank actually says that he was ranked 1003 instead of 998, this problem wouldn't happen. Put another way, we rank competitors, not scores. The rank n is supposed to indicate that you are the nth best competitor, not that you have the nth best score. If two people tie for first and you come in right after them with the second best score, you're still the third best competitor, and the guys ahead of you both happen to be the best because there's no way to differentiate their performance, hence the ranks 1,1,3. Make sense? Hope this helps. By the way, I've never seen it any other way, in sports, programming, or anything else. If you have no tiebreaker, then you rank equally and skip over the block that the tied competitors would have filled. On May 24, 1:26 pm, Amahdy <[email protected]> wrote: > http://code.google.com/codejam/contest/scoreboard?c=1128486#sp=981 > > At the end of the page, *Nova2358* and *truongbom* got the same Rank (999) > and in the next page, it starts with Rank "1001" > Because they submitted at exactly the same time, they got the same Rank but > shouldn't the next one's Rank be "1000"? > Same happened in 1A and looks like it's happening everywhere... I know this > won't let someone get qualified because the terms said "the top 1000 > scoring" not "up to Rank 1000" but it's just confusing a little bit to have > some missing ranks in the scoreboard, isn't it? > > Oh and BTW, only 3 seconds do matter from letting you being qualified or > not! very hard :D > > -- Amahdy AbdElAzizhttp://www.linkedin.com/in/amahdyabdelaziz -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "google-codejam" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-code?hl=en.
