Montag, 7. November 2016

Swiss Team Selections 2017

As Swiss Orienteering got more detailed on the changes in both the National Team as the National Junior Team it is no longer necessary to go into details (just they missed to mention that Florian Schneider changed to the B-Team as he no longer counts as U-23).

But I updated my overview table on the Swiss Team since 1999.

As this years detail I choose the number of years in the B-Team.There Andreas Rüedlinger screens an impressing stamina. He got selected for the tenth season as a member of the B-Team... Note that the average number of seasons for men selected for the team is actually 3 seasons, while the median is as low as 2 seasons.

So here the top ten men:
1. Andreas Rüedlinger 10 ong.
2. Raffael Huber 8
3. Andreas Müller 7
-. Benno Schuler 7
5. Christian Ott 5
-. Dominik Koch 5
6. Christoph Meier 4 ong.
-. Marc Lauenstein 4
-. Andreas Kyburz 4
-. Severin Howald 4
-. Alain Denzler 4

At the women side there is no one in sight to challenge Angela Wilds  leading position, with only Lisa Holer in an ongoing series of 3 seasons. Here the average number of seasons is 3.4 and the median is 3 seasons.

1. Angela Wild 10
2. Franziska Wolleb 7
-. Caroline Cejka 7
4. Ines Brodmann 6
-. Sara Lüscher 6
6. Rahel Friederich 5
-. Bettina Aebi 5
7. Lea Wegmüller 3
-. Lea Müller 3
-. Noemi Cerny 3
-. Sara Würmli 3
-. Judith Wyder 3
-. Lilly Gross 3
-. Sophie Tritschler 3
-. Lisa Holer 3 ong.

Mittwoch, 5. Oktober 2016

Make long distance great again

If I was the GOD of Orienteering, I would make two  changes in regard of the long distance at WOC. These just to make the long distance the epic it deserves to be. Runners for the podium shall be allowed to show their best performance uninfluenced by other runners. Pack running is not part of the game. Indeed it is its spoiler.
fig.1. WOC 2016 winner Olav Lundanes at the run in. Followed by Daniel Hubmann (3rd) and Matthias Kyburz (7th). (photo: Jan Kocbach, worldofo.com)
fig.2. Tove Alexandersson (1st) and Anne Margrethe Hausken Nordberg (3rd). In the background Sabine Hauswirth (10th) and Mari Fasting (7th).  (photo: WOC2016)


1) Folded starting field

If TV production really needs a 2 min. start interval, I would stick with the WRE-ranking to define start order but would fold  the starting field in half.

So instead of:
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
There will be
5 6 7 4 8 3 9 2 10 1

That way the weakest runner work as buffers between the strongest and the runners going for the medals have a reasonable 4 min start interval...

2) Bonus Sprint

Then I would skip all sorts of butterflies but introduce a simple situate separator method called "bonus sprint".

This bonus sprint just separates the pack leader from the pack. The pack riders are sent to a minor running loop (without map) to give the pack leader a reasonable head-start. Meanwhile the pack riders get the estimated time the running loop takes withdrawn from their running time. (So: if they run to slow, they loose time. If fast the win some seconds; method described here)
So easy, Göran Andersson.  Wasn't it?

Mittwoch, 18. Mai 2016

Mappers Blog: Locator- and Basemaps Zürichberg

Here is a glympse on the locator-and basemaps I composed for the coming project, a revision of Zürichberg (fig.1.). As the relief is generally unspectacular, I will not be able to use the micro-contour relief (fig.2-3) as an location-tool. So I hope vegetation height (fig.4) and conifers (fig.5) will do the trick. 
fig.1 The old map from 2008.
fig.2. ... a relief ...
fig.3. ... the contours 1.25m ...
fig.4. ... the clearings ...
fig.5. ... and finally the conifers.

Figures 3-5 are pngs with transparencies, thus can be used combined.




Freitag, 8. April 2016

Unplaned experiment on competitor steering on 2nd Swiss national competition 2016

In the aftermath of last weekends 2nd Swiss national competition it turned out that the organizer renounced to overprint all of the out-of-bound areas which they agreed with the local authorities.  Some were left undisplayed because the course-setters thought these areas would be avoided by common sense and because they only would make the map less readable (destroying the big picture, important in this type of terrain).

Once the local hunting party found that out, the press was concerned ...

The whole case reminded me of a project I collaborated  some years ago where we were sitting hidden in the forest and peeked for orienteering competitors willingly and unwillingly crossing into marked as unmarked OOB  areas. (For the records: we did not see any willingly crossings but many unwillingly crossings).

How well did it go last weekend?  - I ran a script by Jarkko Ryyppö on the route choices drawn in RouteGadget. The script basically assumes that the route choices drawn by the runners of one class represent the class as whole and in equal shares. (f.eg. 5 route choices drawn in a class with 30 competitors each get to represent 6 runners). Obviously, the more route choices you got the more representative the result turns out. The results shown here base on 218 route choices/17% of all competitors route choices.

Overview

fig.1. Competition map with "runner density". All OOB (on map as undisplayed) areas are marked in purple.

OOBs on the map

 fig.2. OOB on map
 fig.3. OOB on map
 fig.4. OOB on map
fig.5. OOB on map

 fig.6. OOB on map
 fig.7. OOB on map
fig.8. OOB on map.

What we can see here is a very high compliance by the participants. Except from the OOB on figure 6 where some few cut the south-western corner of the OOB (not marked in terrain.) all these areas seem to be a 100% followed. This high score likely  is also due to smart course setting (it should never gainful to cross an OOB)

Undisplayed OOBs

 fig.9. Undisplayed OOB
 fig.10. Undisplayed OOB
 fig.11. Undisplayed OOB
 fig.12. Undisplayed OOB
 fig.13.Undisplayed OOB
 fig.14. Undisplayed OOB

At the undisplayed OOB we find three uncrossed areas, fig.9, fig.12 and fig.13, which worked fine according to the course setters reasoning. fig.10 and fig.12 both show a single crossing. In case of fig.10. it looks like a GPS inaccuracy. In case of fig.12. it is just a very bad route choice.

Finally the OOB on fig.13 had a lot of crossings mostly along the track on the ridge. It turned out that this lay on the way of a possible route choice for M45 to the second control plus was more or less the only alternative to their sixth control (see fig.15; similar for M35). Also several runners of  M18 passed the ridge and one of them left the track towards south-east. Also some ME, MAL runner. In this single case there is a clear miss by the course-setting in regard of the OOB.
fig.15. M45 6th control.

Resumption

The combination of course-setting and overprinting OOB areas resulted in a very high success rate in regard of keeping OOB areas free from competitors. Of course there might be a bias on the overprinted OOB as people are not to admit public that they breached the competition rules.

Even without overprint the impact on the OOB was minimal as long as they were consiered by the the course-setting team.

Observations during other competitions suggest that the rate of crossings of overprinted OOB areas is generally  low but unlikely zero. Marking the areas border does further reduce the number of violations, but will not reduce this rate to nothing.

Freitag, 5. Februar 2016

Mappers Blog: Use an external GPS to work with Mapper on Android

As my colleagues at Orienteering Mappers Int. reported some difficulties to get their external GPS linked to OCAD on a Windows OS, I thought I would just test how well this went  with Mapper on Android...
fig.1. Heading for a happy end: Mapper on Android and SXBlue II GPS.

To get to use an external GPS on Mapper there are two basic steps to do:

1) Pair the GPS with your phone via Bluetooth.
  • Put the GPS on
  • Enable the phones Bluetooth
  • Scan for new devices
  • Pair phone and GPS by entering the PIN.
2) Mock your phone to the external GPS position 
  • Install the app Bluetooth GPS on your phone
  • Get developper status on your phone
  • Change the setting "Allow Mock Locations" to yes
  • Open Bluetooth GPS; connect; enable Mock GPS provider.
Done.

The KanPas Focus 200

So here is the KanPas Focus 200. Actually the compass making orienteering easy. Maybe even too easy? - Sorry for that. fig.1. What a beauty ...