A bit more Excel

 I've done nothing but post about Excel championships here this month, and I'm very sorry if it's bored you. But you shouldn't be reading my blog if you're bored by competitive spreadsheeting, so it's more your fault than mine. I'll go back to writing strange things about comics and cartoons as soon as I can, and I'll go into alarming length about how much I love Simon the chipmunk.

But today was the draw for the finals of the Microsoft Excel World Championship, and I have to say, this is kind of an ideal batch of potential opponents for me!

Paulo Guerra didn't quite get a high enough score in the qualification round at the weekend, but got a wildcard entry. My potential opponents in round 2, Ashleigh Roberts and Hunter Wylie, both qualified through the qualification round, but with lower scores than my just-for-fun total. All three of them competed in the Road to Las Vegas competitions this year, and Hunter got a higher score than me in the first one, but I was better than all three of them in all eight of the others.

So that takes care of the fear of being paired against someone who's unstoppably better than me. We still have the fear of getting a task that my opponent knows how to do better than I do, but the chances of that seem rather smaller. All three of my rivals, I can see from the score breakdown in the qualification round, did all the questions that I know how to do with Excel, and didn't attempt the ones I did by old-fashioned manual calculation because using Excel for them seemed too complicated.

This seems to suggest that if (or when) I lose these matches, it will be because of my own stupidity - which is somehow better than losing to someone who's just so manifestly better than me that I was always going to lose anyway. So really, thanks to this draw, overconfidence is going to be my worst enemy.

And if I get through to the last 64, there's a fair chance I'd be up against Lorenzo Foti, who is one of the seeds who I might almost possibly have a chance of beating on a very good day. Though he usually beats me without too much difficulty. All in all, though, a favourable draw!

I'll try to think of something else to write about until the championship starts on October 11th. 

The fascination of competition

 I don't think they do A-Level General Studies any more. It was an extra A-Level that everyone took, but which didn't count for anything - getting into university and getting a job or whatever, the only things that counted were the 'real' A-Levels you'd done. I have no idea why GS existed (and for all I know, still does exist), but I got a A, so I must be great.

I haven't thought about it for more than thirty years, but it just came back to me today as I was thinking of a title for this blog post, that one of the things in the GS exam I took in or around May 1994 was the requirement to write an essay on your choice of a selection of vague prompts. One of them was "The fascination of..." and the first thing that came into my head was "competition". I didn't write it, because they were more looking for a way to show off that you know about and are interested in some esoteric subject, but it just goes to show I already knew at that tender age I love competing in strange things.

And that was many years before I got into memory competitions, and found out that there was something I could not just have fun competing in, but have fun being the world's best at! But I still like taking part in these things just as much as I like winning them, and that's what still attracts me to the Microsoft Excel World Championship... it's just that I'm starting to increasingly get the feeling I could devote a lot more effort to getting really good at this thing!

Incidentally, the German Memory Championship took place in Paderborn last weekend (or "the German Memory Championship took, in Paderborn, place" - I always parse that sentence in the German word order, because I always read reports of it afterwards and they always start like that), and I would have been all over that ten or fifteen years ago, but being impoverished at the moment and not able to travel places, I'm getting very out of touch with the in-person memory world. Keeping up with the mostly online Excel championships is a nice substitute, and I did win an online memory match yesterday morning (the one I really needed to win if I want to stay in division 2 of the Memory League) before kicking off with the big final qualification round for the Microsoft Excel World Championship at five o'clock!

I was already qualified, so just doing this one for the fun of it, but I did rather well! 15th place, or joint-14th really, because I managed to get the exact same score and time, to the second, as Nick Boberg. He was doing the different case from the early-morning session (or whatever time that makes it in New Zealand), so it's not really comparable at all, but it's still cool, because he generally does much better than me at these things.

And so even though most of the top competitors were just doing this for fun, and even though there's really no difference between fifteenth and fiftieth in this kind of thing except a few lucky guesses... I'm happy with this. It was the kind of case where you could get a good score by whizzing through the easy sections, giving up on the one that would take a monstrously complicated Excel calculation, and doing as much of it as possible by working it out manually, one question at a time. And I usually thrive on those - I'm quick-thinking if not particularly knowledgeable about Excel, and sometimes that can carry you through.

But it really reminds me of my early days in memory competitions, when I got good scores in the old 'poem' discipline, and people said to me "If you could get good at the other stuff, you could be really great at this!" And I laughed and said I wouldn't know how to get good at the other stuff. And then I figured out how to get good at the other stuff, and I became the world champion.

Could I do the same with Excel? Is there scope for developing my skills at Excel formulas to put me more on a par with the top people, and let my general all-round problem-solving experience give me a little extra edge? It's the kind of thing I'm starting to seriously think about.

Meanwhile, it's the draw for the finals on Tuesday, at 3pm UK time! Probably live on the YouTube channel! So don't miss it!

My chances of doing well in this competition rely probably quite a lot more on luck than skill. Some cases of the type I was just talking about would help me - anything that can be solved easily with Excel formulas of the kind I'm shockingly ignorant of is going to handicap me pretty severely. And more importantly, who will I get drawn against?

Some of those 256 spots are a lot kinder to middle-ranked competitors than others. The top 32 in the Road to Las Vegas are seeded (I was 63rd), and you want to avoid them for as many rounds as possible. Get drawn against, say, Diarmuid Early, who amazed everyone on the live stream yesterday by finishing the entire case (including the bit I decided straight away was too complicated to calculate) in half the time available, and you're out at the first step. Get drawn against someone of roughly equal skill to myself for as many rounds as possible, and I'll be much happier, even if I still make a mess of it. Because it really is the taking part that counts the most!

So wish me luck, and bear in mind that I'm still considering whether it's possible for me to really work on this, and become really good at it!