Reference The Graphs Thread **IMAGE HEAVY** - Back in Business Again!

Uh....

Im NOT a Postaholic...

I can quit any time....


....no wait, ..DURN!!..this counts as a post...ARRRRGHH!!!!!

...no really..I can quit!!..I just dont want to!!

.........I have a life, really, I do!...uh...

DURN IT ALL!

 

Gasp! It's a like a dream come true! Thanks Xan!

 

Here's an idea: life-span of an RP vs. the number of misspellings and grammatical errors in the title and opening post.

 

Well, if the misspellings and errors are the independent, I'd imagine it'd be a negative power function (Or possibly an exponential, ie b^x with b being a fraction less than 1). I suppose in either case what I'm insinuating is the limit as x tends to infinity is ZERO.

 

I don't understand what any of that means, but I assume it means that poorly written beginnings don't do well as RPGs.

 

These graphs are bottling my mind...

 

Boggling?

 

That too.

 

Essentially, yes, the graphs would show that as misspellings and bad grammar increase, the lifespan shortens. The functions I described would just mean that after a certain point it would decrease dramatically, to the point of a theoretically "infinitely many misspellings" post having no life span (As in, the first post gets locked)

That's just my guess, though. The actual graph would only tend towards one of those conceptual models as the number of RPs in the forums tended towards infinity.

For reference:

Exponential Decay: [image=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3a/Exponential_Decay_of_Nuclei-de.svg/600px-Exponential_Decay_of_Nuclei-de.svg.png]

Negative Power Function: [image=http://id.mind.net/~zona/mmts/functionInstitute/rationalFunctions/oneOverX/Pic2.gif]

 

Gotcha.

That's pretty much what I thought.

 

I think we need to name this phenomenon; something like "Parabola of Mystery" or "The Ramza Effect" or "Trudeau's Daughter Phenomenon".

 

I think the problem is that poorly written OPs speak to the GM not caring enough and having the wrong idea about what he's setting out to do.

 

it's the "GM Apathy Theorum".

on another note, i am sorry about dropping lea monde xan. really didn't want to, but my life completely fell apart. i was enjoying that one a lot.

:snoopy

 

Although would that lead people to conclude that I came up with the general trends or that I had a really, really bad OP once?

Now that I've put some thought into it, the function would probably need to have a +1 post factor taken into account, since there has to be an initial post for there to be misspellings in the first place. And of course the function is not applicable if misspellings or grammar errors are less than 1.

So what we're looking at (In mathese):

The GM Apathy Theorem, AKA The Ramza Effect:

Assuming an infinite number of RPs, the behavior of the lifespan function f(x) of a given RP in posts is given by:

f(x) = g(x) + 1, 1 <= x

Where g(x) is some function of misspellings and/or grammatical errors, x, such that lim x->0 g(x) = Infinity and lim x->Infinity g(x) = 0. The behavior of f(x) at x=0 is dependent on the RP Success Factor (Which is unique for each RP).

... Did I just type that up?

 

Wow...cool stuff Xan!

 

just had to say, awesome name.

yes... i believe you did ramza. and i think i could follow it... somewhat.

:snoopy

 

Darn, I was afraid of that.

Well, there isn't actually a lot to follow. Even as far as I can discern, g(x) is going to be so ridiculously complex that I doubt my approximation can get too terribly accurate. Still, I thought it was a fun way of thinking about a very important point: Spelling and grammar matter.

It's just that my definition of fun is... well, odd.

 

there are many definitions of fun. the most common one is things that you enjoy doing.

it's more i'm surprised i could follow it since i've not done anything with algebra in a while. and i'm not all here right this second.

:snoopy

 

Thank you. Great movie.

I await more graphs. They are very interesting to look at.

 

My eyes glaze over at the math.

More graphs: what would you like to see? Personally I've pretty much satisfied my curiosity, here, but if people want to see graphs for particular people/games/metrics I can do that easily. Just supply me with a link and what you'd like to see.

Basically what I've done is download entire threads into single files (so like, all sixty-odd Tide of Flames pages would be saved into "TideOfFlames.xml") and then number-crunch them, so I can pull out whatever. So far I've only done stuff like timeline graphs and such, but potentially I could count occurrences of the word "boat" or number of markup tags used by a particular user ... or so on so forth.

Misspellings w.r.t. lifespan might be a little more difficult (would have to run everything through a decent spell-checker that knew words like "lightsaber"), but I can look into that. I think it'd just confirm what people have guessed though.

 

The graphs are brilliant, I cant wait to see more.

 

Oh hey, minor snag: the board code update broke my script. Hopefully I'll have time to fix it within the next few days.

 

Update: Fix'd! We're back in business.

New graphs will be up as soon as I figure out what to graph exactly.

 

We're back!

My grapher script has gotten dusty with disuse of late, but I've gotten renewed interest from some people (more or less independently, funnily enough) which has in turn renewed my interest in it. Funny how that happens.

When I started this, I thought it would be cool to see timeline charts of games over time, but I think what turned out to be most interesting are the charts of authors-per-game. Thus:


Man Cubs

<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v605/xany/graphs/ManCubs_Authors.jpg">


Way of the Ninja

<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v605/xany/graphs/Ninja_Authors.jpg">


The Dark Odyssey

<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v605/xany/graphs/Odyssey_Authors.jpg">


Interesting, no? How about number of words per author?

Man Cubs

<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v605/xany/graphs/ManCubs_Words.jpg">


Way of the Ninja

<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v605/xany/graphs/Ninja_Words.jpg">


The Dark Odyssey

<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v605/xany/graphs/Odyssey_Words.jpg">


Next ... average words per post, perhaps? That might be interesting too.


Also, the scripts I use to generate these graphs are quite easy to use, so if anyone is interested in learning how, I can show you.

 

Oh, how I missed this thread.

I like the word count per author displays, it's interesting how occasionally you'll see someone with fewer posts have a higher word count, and of course vice versa. Probably indicative more of writing and play style than anything else.