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Volleyball, box scores, etc.
Jan. 12th, 2006 12:46 amMy entire day has been processing two problems I'm trying to solve in my head.
One is debugging a script at work. I think I have finally at least isolated what the hell is going wrong, but solving it will require redoing my algorithm.
The other is my favorite new logic puzzle!!!!@!!1!!11one. Take a random baseball boxscore from the first half of the twentieth century on the New York Times archives, before the time period where Retrosheet has the play-by-plays available, preferably of a long complicated game where they actually used *gasp* two pitchers on a side. Using the box score summaries and the text in the article, figure out the earned and unearned runs to assign to each pitcher.
Holy fuck this is both really complex and difficult and TOTALLY entertaining in a "Whee! Logic Puzzle!" sort of way.
For example, the one that I've been hacking at is this one (PDF file, copied from the NYT archive). I'm trying to figure out when Mulcahy got taken out in the second inning and how many earned runs were charged to him. This is not as easy as it sounds. But I figured out a lot of great things so far. For example, from the article I know that Whitehead batted in 5 runs with a triple in the 4th and a double in the 6th. Young batted in 2 runs in the first with a two-run homer. Every other run in the game was batted in during that epic 2nd inning. The two-run homer had Moore on base when he hit it, because Moore only had two hits in the game and one had to be in the second inning since he batted in two runs, thus his first one was in the first inning. Whitehead was up to bat 6 times, and got hits in the second, fourth, and sixth innings. He scored a run in the second. He was the last batter of the game and got out somehow (we know this because there were 17 hits, 1 error, 4 walks, and 24 outs for the Giants, which totals to 46 plate appearances, or 5 times around the order plus one. Also there were only four walks and Rucker batting second comes up short of an AB, but so do Ott, Cuccinello and Witek, and Rucker couldn't have walked to end the game anyway. I know that every player but Danning scored a run in the second inning; also Danning hit his double and RBI in the second inning because it was his only hit in the game. I know that Witek scored a run in the second inning and was batted in by Melton, because Whitehead and Rucker couldn't have batted him in that inning and there's no way Moore could have batted him in, since Whitehead and Rucker had to score runs that inning as well.
Anyway, you get the idea. The best part about this as a logic puzzle is that wheeeee, I can get an unlimited number of box scores for freeeeee and disseminate them this way. I'm almost thinking it'd be fun to make up some baseball logic puzzles this way, even. Man, I'm a dork.
Umm, anyway, the other thing I did this evening was go to volleyball. We had a bazillion people there so we ended up splitting into 3 teams of 5 and playing shorter games. I sort of hate this because of the downtime -- I wanted to stay warmed up so I ran on a treadmill for a bit and lifted weights and basically just jumped around a lot to not become dead weight. The games went reasonably well though. Little John was getting all this advice from a random dude who wandered in and I thought it was just some gym guy being a know-it-all (since John is a freaking AWESOME volleyball player, but he's the same height I am -- even his teenage son is like half a foot taller than him), but it turned out to be his volleyball coach from some league he plays in, so then I felt sort of bad for giggling about it. On the other hand, like I said, pretty much every single person in our volleyball circle was there, plus a new woman who was really really good too -- hell of an arm. Eddie is back in school and has time to play again, and even Laura came back, she'd been gone a few weeks, and Jen apparently feels her knees are strong enough to play, finally. So, yeah. Fun stuff. We pretty much played until the gym was kicking us out.
One is debugging a script at work. I think I have finally at least isolated what the hell is going wrong, but solving it will require redoing my algorithm.
The other is my favorite new logic puzzle!!!!@!!1!!11one. Take a random baseball boxscore from the first half of the twentieth century on the New York Times archives, before the time period where Retrosheet has the play-by-plays available, preferably of a long complicated game where they actually used *gasp* two pitchers on a side. Using the box score summaries and the text in the article, figure out the earned and unearned runs to assign to each pitcher.
Holy fuck this is both really complex and difficult and TOTALLY entertaining in a "Whee! Logic Puzzle!" sort of way.
For example, the one that I've been hacking at is this one (PDF file, copied from the NYT archive). I'm trying to figure out when Mulcahy got taken out in the second inning and how many earned runs were charged to him. This is not as easy as it sounds. But I figured out a lot of great things so far. For example, from the article I know that Whitehead batted in 5 runs with a triple in the 4th and a double in the 6th. Young batted in 2 runs in the first with a two-run homer. Every other run in the game was batted in during that epic 2nd inning. The two-run homer had Moore on base when he hit it, because Moore only had two hits in the game and one had to be in the second inning since he batted in two runs, thus his first one was in the first inning. Whitehead was up to bat 6 times, and got hits in the second, fourth, and sixth innings. He scored a run in the second. He was the last batter of the game and got out somehow (we know this because there were 17 hits, 1 error, 4 walks, and 24 outs for the Giants, which totals to 46 plate appearances, or 5 times around the order plus one. Also there were only four walks and Rucker batting second comes up short of an AB, but so do Ott, Cuccinello and Witek, and Rucker couldn't have walked to end the game anyway. I know that every player but Danning scored a run in the second inning; also Danning hit his double and RBI in the second inning because it was his only hit in the game. I know that Witek scored a run in the second inning and was batted in by Melton, because Whitehead and Rucker couldn't have batted him in that inning and there's no way Moore could have batted him in, since Whitehead and Rucker had to score runs that inning as well.
Anyway, you get the idea. The best part about this as a logic puzzle is that wheeeee, I can get an unlimited number of box scores for freeeeee and disseminate them this way. I'm almost thinking it'd be fun to make up some baseball logic puzzles this way, even. Man, I'm a dork.
Umm, anyway, the other thing I did this evening was go to volleyball. We had a bazillion people there so we ended up splitting into 3 teams of 5 and playing shorter games. I sort of hate this because of the downtime -- I wanted to stay warmed up so I ran on a treadmill for a bit and lifted weights and basically just jumped around a lot to not become dead weight. The games went reasonably well though. Little John was getting all this advice from a random dude who wandered in and I thought it was just some gym guy being a know-it-all (since John is a freaking AWESOME volleyball player, but he's the same height I am -- even his teenage son is like half a foot taller than him), but it turned out to be his volleyball coach from some league he plays in, so then I felt sort of bad for giggling about it. On the other hand, like I said, pretty much every single person in our volleyball circle was there, plus a new woman who was really really good too -- hell of an arm. Eddie is back in school and has time to play again, and even Laura came back, she'd been gone a few weeks, and Jen apparently feels her knees are strong enough to play, finally. So, yeah. Fun stuff. We pretty much played until the gym was kicking us out.
