School of Emergent Priorities researchers solved 10,000 weightings of one darts association's season fixture and found no term moving more than 4.6 per cent, while a single venue's unavailable night was worth 3.4 times the whole weighting debate.
Twenty seasons, 8,640 matches and 10,000 solved fixtures behind a weight schedule the association now publishes each winter
Twenty years of one metropolitan darts association’s records have been rebuilt as an optimisation problem, and every way of weighting it tried in turn.
Multi-Objective Fixture Construction for a Suburban Darts League, a paper from the School of Emergent Priorities released today, takes the fourteen things a fixture committee argues about each winter — travel, rest between matches, keeping neighbouring clubs apart, spreading the hosting — and treats them as the terms of one objective. Ten thousand weightings were drawn and solved against 8,640 matches transcribed from twenty published seasons.
The fixtures that come back are hard to tell apart. No term moved more than 4.6 per cent of its own best attainable value across the whole span of weightings, and the middle solution shared 92.6 per cent of its assignments with the one the association’s ratified weights produce. Against that, a single venue unable to host on the competition’s night accounted for 3.4 times the travel the entire weighting debate could move.
The minutes tell you what a committee argued about. They do not tell you what the argument moved, and until now there was nothing to ask that question with.
— Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor of Futures in Committee
The association’s own hand-drawn fixtures, the paper finds, had been sitting inside the modelled range all along. It has since published its weight schedule, adopted an annual ratification cycle ahead of each draw, and opened a written path for a member club to contest a weighting before the fixture is generated.
Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group, said the result “puts a number on something committees everywhere suspect, which is that the room’s attention and the problem’s structure are not always the same shape”.
The University treats the work as evidence that the School’s account of how priorities harden into commitments holds well outside the institution that funds it.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.2q3v7p.