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Comment by jszymborski | Hacker News Reader

I choose the chaotic option of sorting by the score:

  3 * gold + 2 * silver + bronze

Sorting by gold feels as incorrect to me as sorting by total medals. Sure, a bronze isn't as good as a gold, but sorting by gold is silver/bronze erasure.

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It should be ranked by per capita population. Tiny countries (like Japan or UK) winning more than half gold of US is way more impressive to me.

Interesting! Perhaps we can do something like:

  3 * gold + 2 * silver + bronze + β1 / population + β2 / GDP

where β1 and β2 are some coefficients.

How do we choose these coefficients? Maybe try to run a simple regression to see how historically predictive pop and GDP are of a nations score w/o the GDP and pop terms.

See my other comment of 'total medals/number of residents', Japan is in the middle (same level as Germany, France and Russia),

New Zealand is at the top, then Australia, the Netherlands and GB (probably some others, I only calculated the number for the top of the rankings).

Gold is the only one that matters. Including two more consolation places is completely arbitrary. (Why not have one and stop at silver? Why not have three and include copper after bronze?) It just benefits countries that can field larger teams. Number of second place finishes should only be used as a tie-breaker.

That is actually what pretty much every medals table, including the official table on olympics.com, already does (except in the USA because it's important to say we're number one, even if it's number one in third place finishes).

If one country managed to win all the silver medals, while each of the other countries managed to get one gold medal each, which country got the best results at the Olympics?

There isn't one perfect scoring system in this case, but disregarding everything but gold would completely ignore the value of second place, which is still a win over all other competitors but the first place

The silver medal is a consolation prize. The other countries would tie for first in the number of first place finishes, which is all that matters. Again, this is what most medals tables already do.

5 points gold 3 points silver 1 point bronze

Those were the calculations for video games winter games/summer games in the 1980. Why not use that?

I think you stumbled on a great idea!

Ranking each country by the sum of the normalised reciprocal of their placements in events.

I think that would be pretty cool.

Ranking by gold or ranking by total medals in my mind remain terrible ways to rank.

Again, silver and bronze are consolation prizes, so extrapolating even further from there is a fool's errand. Some sports (including most of the team sports) don't even allow countries to field multiple entries, with the strong implication that those other places don't matter.

Tournament-based sports at the Olympics don't even bother to define a ranking after fourth, and many sporting events outside the Olympics don't even bother determining ranking after second and only go as far as second because it's needed to determine who is first.

To quote the Big L, "that's just, like, your opinion man".

I, for one, think we do an incredible disservice to the athletes that perform to not acknowledge other places.

When an athlete manages to beat an Olympic or World record and comes in second by a hair, I think its pretty silly to state "other places don't matter".

First place is better than second is better than 8th is better than 11th.

If these places didn't matter, why would we bother keeping record of standings?

I just don't get the "Gold or last" mentality.

Because that way of thinking encourages sending hundreds, thousands, or millions of competitors and because (as shown by sports that don't allow one country to win multiple medals) the organizers of the sports don't think those other places matter either. We don't try to determine the world rankings of people who failed to qualify for the Olympics, nor should we try to determine the rankings of teams that fail to qualify from group play into elimination rounds of the Olympics, nor should we try to rank teams that are eliminated from elimination rounds that haven't played each other. They're top athletes, but the point of each Olympic sport is to determine the best. Any additional ranking computed beyond that is purely arbitrary.

If you think a silver at the olys is a "consolation prize" then you have never spent a moment in any type of real athletic competition, let alone been among the best of the best on the planet.

The level of competition does not change the definition of the phrase. If you think it does, you have never used a dictionary before, let alone understood my comments.

It might have been arbitrary many decades ago to decide the cut-off to be at 3, but the athletes have been since optimizing for those arbitrary rules, i.e. getting somewhere above that cut-off.

Instead of maximizing for first place, which requires a different strategy, i.e going „all in“.

I prefer a binary increment: 4*gold + 2*silver + bronze

How about basing it on the cost of the medal itself? ( ;

gold - $815

silver - $445

bronze - $5

https://en.as.com/en/2021/07/23/olympic_games/1627028063_790...

I thought the same, from the scores in the article, China and the States are very close.

What are the results if you do that?

Surely the US pulls ahead as currently they have a large lead in total medals and are not too far behind in gold

I'll post a spreadsheet in a moment, but here's the top 5:

- USA: 167