This is a system I developed to fairly calculate the winner of a magic competition based on judges scores. Theoretically it can be used to celculate the outcome of any kind of competition. If that's enough of an explanation for you, excellent.
Click here to go to the calculator.
This calculator is designed to work with competitions where every competitor is seen by every judge.
Each judge will assign a score to each competitor, and all of these are entered into the table.
Additionally every non judge observer may enter a single vote for their favourite. These are counted in the public vote, and will only be used to break up a tie.
The algorithm will then calculate a winner.
When setting up the scoresheet you may also decide wether to accept multiple 2nd or 3rd place finalists. If there's no physical trophy for that place, I see no reason not to announce a tie for that position and make them all feel a bit better.
You may also enable the test function. The only change is that the test feature allows you to fill the entire scorecard with random numbers between 0 and 300, just to test it out with meaningless data.
In the off chance that you'd like to run this whole setup locally on your own computer without internet access, I've bundled up all the files you'll need.
You can even change the rules to fit your own idea of how a fair competition is run.
Click here to download the sources
This system was devised to account for the personal preferences of certain judges. if the raw scores are used and one judge gives a high score for a single competitor and low for everyone else, that one judge is having a larger effect on the outcome than a judge who spreads their points more evenly.
This may happen regardless of the systems put in place to guide the judges in their scoring.
This is countered by insulating the magnitude of the scores from the final result. Every judge awards a gold medal to their highest score, a silver to their second highest, and a bronze to their third. As every judge has the exact same output, all judges have the same impact on the result.
To calculate the winner, we see which competitor recieves the most gold medals. If multiple competitors recieve the same number of gold medals, silver are taken into account for those, and then bronze if the silvers match. This means no amount of silver or bronze can defeat a single gold medal. The winner will always be someone at least one of the judges thought was best.
To award a second place, gold medals are converted into 2 silver medals each, and the process is run again with silver medals.
Finally every silver medal becomes 2 bronze medals and the process is run again.
Every person in the audience may also pick one favourite act to award a plastic medal. These will be far more plentiful than the other medals and the number of them is used to break up a tie. If two or more competitors tie even on plastic medals, a second round of plastic medals can be requested to add to these competitors for breaking the tie.