Ok, it's tiring to argue. Show me a 'White Paper" showing that "transitive closures" are the most mathematically clean solution to this problem, and I will conceed. But after googling for it, and reading it's wikipedia entry, it makes things even more confusing. :-) My idea is to make a multiplicative string of each team that you have beat. Then store that as a hash key. For the sort, divide that by the other team symbol, and cancel out values in the numerator. (Or something like that :-)...which would yield a value if you beat the other team. Of course, instead of a binary value there, we could move to real numbers, and account for point differential, weather, time of day, etc. You see where I'm going with this?

Actually, about 30 years ago, there was an article in Sport's Illustrated about a guy who could predict thorobred horserace winners with a program similar to this. He entered all previous race data for the horses(teams), like weather, track, temperature, jockey weight, head to head wins, time of day, etc. Then he could set up his model with today's conditions, and predict who would win.

He was making a consistent profit by racing....probably with something like 30% accuracy.

I too, am tired of arguing with a fellow monk, so this is all I say.

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth My Petition to the Great Cosmic Conciousness

In reply to Re^7: Adding Special Rules to Sort by zentara
in thread Adding Special Rules to Sort by ctfishman

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