Frequently asked questions:

Q: What is this?
A: It's a scatter-plot tool that shows you what times a 2 competitors need to win an average-of-5 finals round, where the fastest and slowest times of that average are excluded! Basically, Player 1's times are on the x-axis, and Player 2's times are on the y-axis, so each solve is a point. Whichever color the 5th solve point lands on, tells you who has won the average. (If it's white, they must have tied.) Check out this video for more info

Q: Why are there white squares along the diagonals?
A: It has to do with rounding of averages, making ties easier to get! For example, suppose competitor A has times 1.00, 1.50, 1.50, 2.00. Then, if their fifth time is either 1.49, 1.50, or 1.51, then their overall average will be 1.50. This is true for the other competitor, too. This means each square representing both competitors getting the same average are 0.03x0.03 in size. (This is following the WCA regulations).

Q: Is this mathematically accurate?
A: If you don't put in really weird times, then *probably*. But I'm honestly not sure. I only tested this sporadically over the course of the 4-day competition, so it is very likely there are edge cases that cause the program to glitch out and produce incorrect results! Specifically, I've noticed very weird behavior when a competitor gets more than two DNFs, but I ignored that mostly because I think that should be pretty rare for a 3x3 finals round. Assuming there are no DNFs though, *in my own experience*, I haven't noticed any mathematical errors. I could be wrong though.

Q: The source code is hard to read.
A: Yeah, that's what happens when I try to create something within a 5-hour timeframe! It was like a hackathon. I wasn't focused too hard on writing elegant code, just something that wouldn't crash when showtime came. (Also, for some reason, the IDE I was using (Atom) formatted tab-indentations differently than other places, so now the indentation looks really weird to anybody else. Oh well!) In fact, I feel like it's a miracle that the math formulas I used to draw the colored regions even work at all, because it's a hodgepodge of stuff I tweaked until it worked. I bet if a mathematician sat down at meticulously planned a more efficient way of drawing the regions, they could come up with something foolproof with fewer lines of code. I invite you all to give a try!

Q: Will you update this and/or add new features?
A: Probably not. This was a minimum-viable product I started during a 5-hour plane ride and finished across a 4-day competition. As long as it gets the bare-bones features across, I'm satisfied with it! If you'd like to add your own features to it, feel free to play around with the source code on GitHub.

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