Monte McNair has kindly offered to host this year's Machine Madness contest on the Ultimate Bracket Challenge website. If you're thinking about competing, head over there to create an account and familiarize yourself with the site!
Using Ultimate Bracket Challenge will also give us the opportunity to modify the scoring. The "traditional" scoring approach of 1-2-4-8-16-32 is heavily weighted to the late rounds. In some ways that can be good -- previous MM contests have gone down to the last game -- but in some ways it's bad -- you can be out of the contest fairly early. The Kaggle Competition is at the other end of the spectrum. All games are treated equally, and the competitors predict all possible games, so no one is ever "out of it". That's interesting, too, but since Kaggle has that covered I don't want to swing too far in that direction.
Ultimate Bracket Challenge also has the option of a market-type approach, where points are divided up between the number of people that correctly picked the winner for that game. That might be an option for us as well.
If you have any thoughts on how to score this year's Machine Madness leave a comment or send me an email.
I'm also thinking about prizes, so if you know of a company who'd like to offer a prize as part of the contest in exchange for the massive marketing value of being mentioned on this blog :-), please let me know that as well!
Account created..Now to come up with the clever team name..
ReplyDeleteHave you thought about pinging Revolution Analytics for some free stickers or shirts or anything? Maybe RapidMiner? Sadly I don't have any contacts in any of those places, but twitter might be a start.