Great stuff, guys. This helps a lot.
You make a great point about boats/sailors getting slower. My opinion would be to not increase a handicap based on boats getting less seaworthy and sailors getting Alzheimer's. Unless changes are made to a design/materials, or someone can prove a gross error in calculation of a number (assuming it was based on a large enough data set), I would expect the numbers to be adjusted only to deal with the boats and sailors getting faster.
Mike
Mike,
I was studying that very thing when I was involved. The problem is that you need the rating to have some ability to creep up so that it can settle in. If it had no ability to creep upward, random noise or one human mistake in a submitted result could really unfavorably tilt the rating and it would have no ability to correct.
Darline shared with me the original files and a theory document that explained the calculation of the DPN handicap. While I used to be fluent in Fortran at one time, the statistical part of it was pretty advanced and a bit over my head without an investment in some statistics book-learnin' on my part.
While we were examining this issue, I had considered a way that a rating can lower at a full rate but for it to correct in the higher (slower) direction would be at some reduced rate...say 25% of the rate that it could decrease. That would give it some ability to settle in and account for the outliers in the data while at least slowing down the aging fleet ratings. There were several cases of good sailors taking advantage of this rating creep at the time - but I haven't seen any of that in a long while.
all of this depends on getting submitted results and, even if we could make that happen, it's a monstrous task to get those results entered into a homogenized format that can be used for crunching.
