Sorry about the confusion, Shayna. I was confused myself! You will notice that further down, I posted (at the end of a long explanation on tennis rankings)
And then I added a point to I.M. Kierkegaard and Fretful Porpentine’s previous scores. I was hoping that would be a clue.
As a matter of fact, when I said “reputable site”, I misspoke. The original source for my answer was actually a newspaper that I was browsing at work (the Orange County Register, Orange County, California) that in a sentence had the words “Number 1 seed Alex Corretja (Spain)”. I still don’t know where the paper got that from ?!? Then a web search brought up this site, http://www.worldtennisratings.com/
that also lists Alex Corretja as number one, so I took that on faith. (I guess the list at world tennis ratings is their own ranking system.)
In any event, I take it from your message that you accept Bricker posting for you, so I will change the winner to
Oh, and that webmath page is very cool! Good find. Another thing, in the imitation Bricker challengers, I always try to have at least one question that is answered in a Straight Dope column or mailbag item, to reward the faithful readers. Of course, you may also have noticed my partiality for questions involving Switzerland.
SingleDad, the problem with waiting until the deadline is that you might have one or two questions wrong, and then no chance to correct them.
quadell, your idea of increasing the value of the points for later questions might work. I don’t know mathematically what would be the best scheme though. For example, if we go with your idea, first question worth 1, second question worth 2, etc… up to last question worth 50, I could see this situation:
Poster 1 answers twenty questions = 200 points.
Poster 2 answers another twenty questions = 600 points.
There’s no way you can beat poster 2, even if you get all last 10.
Here’s another scheme: The first person to answer a question gets two points, everyone else gets one point. Would that work?
Or another scheme: Answers always worth at least one point. First person to answer a question gets two points for the first group of ten answered, three points for the second group of ten answered, … up to six points for the last group of ten answered.
I wish I were as handsome, self-confident and, yes, debonair as the answer to #3, but no, the answer to #3 is WWW star Mahir (see posts above for links to Mahir).
