Running byes straight to the wicketkeeper
September 30, 2009 at 9:21 am | Posted in Cricket | 6 CommentsWe once again* saw an international cricket team have no idea what to do when the score is tied with one ball to go (actually Younus Khan looked like he had no idea what was going on at all).
*England had a whole over of missing easy runouts against The Netherlands, I think, in the World T20. That may have been Stuart Broad at the bowler’s end but the same principle applies.
Some simple ideas:
- wicketkeeper up at the stumps
- if you can’t do that, train your keeper so that he can hit the striker’s end stumps 3/4 of the time
- if that doesn’t work, have a short leg there to receive the ball
- also have a short midoff to receive the throw to the other end to prevent the delayed steal*
*This would work, right? The non-striker takes the absurd lead he is allowed under current rules and then the striker waits until the non-striker arrives before setting off on the run. There’s no way to get an out at the striker’s end.
Your team needs to practice this for about 15 minutes once and then they’ll know what to do.
Animated gifs
September 28, 2009 at 5:39 pm | Posted in Mathematics | 3 CommentsYou might say that I could have spent my time better but after a few hours of work I was able to make this rather inscrutable picture. Any guesses as to what it’s doing?
Shane Warne
September 13, 2009 at 5:48 pm | Posted in Cricket | 3 CommentsWith my recent thoughts and endeavours not leading to interesting blog posts (even by the low standards of this site) I will merely give you a youtube video of Shane Warne.
Later in his career Warney was ‘just’ an accurate bowler of legbreaks that turned enough to be dangerous who also had a psychological hold over batsmen and umpires. But circa 1994 he was an absolute bamboozler – the flipper especially was unplayable for people that grew up in South Africa, England, West Indies…
This video from 1994 against South Africa is worth watching:
Quiz answer & discussion
September 3, 2009 at 2:16 pm | Posted in Mathematics | 2 Comments1/3 is ‘correct’ by exactly Dave’s solution. I was going to provide a more detailed and motivated exposition but I don’t think I can be bothered. My knowledge of Bayesian inference comes exclusively from reading the first half of section two of McKay’s textbook Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms so you can read that and know as much as I do.
So, points for Dave for doing what the book did, Yuliya for getting approximately the right answer first and Leesa for having both the worst and possibly the best answer.
The answer of 0.3 is clearly terrible: if you are a frequentist that doesn’t believe in probability representing belief then your real answer should be that the 10 flips are not at all significant.
But the 0.3485 might be pretty good. What was your prior Leesa? I can certainly believe that a prior that is normal with mean 0.5 and some smallish standard deviation is perhaps more reasonable than a uniform prior and that should give us an answer above 1/3.
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