okansas.blogspot.com

okansas.blogspot.com
Occassional thoughts about orienteering

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Widsom of crowds

Last summer I experimented with an idea I'd read about in the book The Wisdom of Crowds. You can read what I wrote on July 10.

I just discovered a Norwegian O' Club using a similar idea to practice orienteering. The club publishes maps with several route choice legs each week. You vote for the leg you think is best and leave comments. At the end of the week, they publish the results and comments.

Take a look at last week's results. The page is in Norwegian and I'm not going to bother translating it, but I'll give you the winners on each of the three legs:

76 percent of the votes picked the red route on the first leg.
40 percent picked the blue route on the second leg.
93 percent picked the red route on the third leg.

It looks like the club plans to put up new route choice problems each week. You can check them out here.

The results would be most interesting if lots of people vote. I don't know if the club is looking to have people from around the world place their votes. But, they aren't preventing you from going in and voting. The instructions are all in Norwegian, which makes it a bit tougher to figure out.

Here are some key Norwegian phrases and words translated to English:

Beste vegvalg? = best route choice?
Gronn, bla, rod = green, blue, red
Begrunn valget ditt her, angi evt. tid spart i forhold til andre vegvalg.
Dersom du krysset for "annet", beskriv kort hvor du ville løpt. = Explain your route here, describe the time you'd save compared to other routes. If you picked "another", describe how you would run.

I think using the internet like this to tap in to the wisdom of crowds is a great idea. If the crowd is large enough, I think you'll likely get a very good idea of which route really is best.

If this sort of stuff interests you, you might also check out the book The Wisdom of Crowds.

posted by Michael | 7:34 PM

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