An Elo-Based Approach to Model Team Players and Predict the Outcome of Games

Sports data analytics has become a popular research area in recent years, with the advent of different ways to capture information about a game or a player. Different statistical metrics have been created to quantify the performance of a player/team. A popular application of sport data anaytics is to generate a rating system for all the team/players involved in a tournament. The resulting rating system can be used to predict the outcome of future games, assess player performances, or come up with a tournament brackets. A popular rating system is the Elo rating system. It started as a rating system for chess tournaments. It’s known for its simple yet elegant way to assign a rating to a particular individual. Over the last decade, several variations of the original Elo rating system have come into existence, collectively know as Elo-based rating systems. This has been applied in a variety of sports like baseball, basketball, football, etc. In this thesis, an Elo-based approach is employed to model an individual basketball player strength based on the plus-minus score of the player. The plus-minus score is a powerful metric because it quantifies the contribution of a player like good defense, setting up screens, or sledging the opposite team, which are not reflected by metrics that are primarilybased on points. Then, the individual player ratings are combined to obtain a team rating, Team rating are compared pairwise to obtain the probability of a win by each of the teams during a matchup. This method not only predicts wins/losses, but offers more information than the Elo rating system as ratings are assigned to each individual player instead of just considering teams. This information includes for example, the effect of mid-season transfers or the impact of injuries to team strengths; these items are overlooked by the standard Elo algorithm. The performance of the proposed Elo-based rating system is compared to that of the standard Elo rating system for basketball by using sythetic data. The rating systems are also compared by running them over real-life data from past NBA seasons

Substituting Quantum Entanglement for Communication

We show that quantum entanglement can be used as a substitute for communication when the goal is to compute a function whose input data is distributed among remote parties. Specifically, we show that, for a particular function among three parties (each of which possesses part of the function's input), a prior quantum entanglement enables one of them to learn the value of the function with only two bits of communication occurring among the parties, whereas, without quantum entanglement, three bits of communication are necessary. This result contrasts the well-known fact that quantum entanglement cannot be used to simulate communication among remote parties.Comment: 4 pages REVTeX, no figures. Minor correction

Pemanfaatan Abu Kulit Kakao (Theobroma Cocoa L) Sebagai Sumber Kalium dan Taraf Kadar Air Tanah Berbeda pada Tanaman Jagung

Waste derived from plant material can be used as a source of plant nutrients. These waste products can be processed into compost to increase soil organic matter. The study aimed to determine the effect of cocoa peel ash application on drought conditions and natural sources of potassium for the growth and production of maize plants. The research design is a Factorial experiment in a Completely Randomized Design consisting of two treatments, namely: the amount of water application equivalent to rainfall (R): (R1) 70 mm / month, (R2) 80 mm / month, and (R3) 90 mm / month; fertilization of cocoa skin ash (K): control (K0), 100 kg/ha (K1), 150 kg/ha (K2), 200 kg/ha (K3), and, (K4) 250 kg/ha repeated 3 times. The results showed that the interaction between cocoa bark ash fertilization and the amount of water application equivalent to rainfall had a very noticeable effect on plant height and leaf area variables, while stem diameter changes had a noticeable effect. Fertilization treatment of 250 kg/ha (K4) best affects plant height, stem diameter, leaf area, and dry weight. The dose of cocoa husk ash fertilization of 200 kg/ha gives the best results on the weight of the seeds per plant, while the dose of 150 kg/ha is best at the weight of 100 seeds. Treatment of the amount of water application equivalent to rainfall of 90 mm/month gives the best results on leaf area, seed weight per plant, weight of 100 seeds, dry weight of plants, and harvest inde

An Elo-Based Approach to Model Team Players and Predict the Outcome of Games

Sports data analytics has become a popular research area in recent years, with the advent of different ways to capture information about a game or a player. Different statistical metrics have been created to quantify the performance of a player/team. A popular application of sport data anaytics is to generate a rating system for all the team/players involved in a tournament. The resulting rating system can be used to predict the outcome of future games, assess player performances, or come up with a tournament brackets. A popular rating system is the Elo rating system. It started as a rating system for chess tournaments. It’s known for its simple yet elegant way to assign a rating to a particular individual. Over the last decade, several variations of the original Elo rating system have come into existence, collectively know as Elo-based rating systems. This has been applied in a variety of sports like baseball, basketball, football, etc. In this thesis, an Elo-based approach is employed to model an individual basketball player strength based on the plus-minus score of the player. The plus-minus score is a powerful metric because it quantifies the contribution of a player like good defense, setting up screens, or sledging the opposite team, which are not reflected by metrics that are primarilybased on points. Then, the individual player ratings are combined to obtain a team rating, Team rating are compared pairwise to obtain the probability of a win by each of the teams during a matchup. This method not only predicts wins/losses, but offers more information than the Elo rating system as ratings are assigned to each individual player instead of just considering teams. This information includes for example, the effect of mid-season transfers or the impact of injuries to team strengths; these items are overlooked by the standard Elo algorithm. The performance of the proposed Elo-based rating system is compared to that of the standard Elo rating system for basketball by using sythetic data. The rating systems are also compared by running them over real-life data from past NBA seasons

Reduction and Emergence in Bose-Einstein Condensates

A closer look at some proposed Gedanken-experiments on BECs promises to shed light on several aspects of reduction and emergence in physics. These include the relations between classical descriptions and different quantum treatments of macroscopic systems, and the emergence of new properties and even new objects as a result of spontaneous symmetry breaking

Spatial patterns of scour and fill in dryland sand bed streams

Reproduced with permission of the publisher. © 2006 American Geophysical UnionSpatial patterns of scour and fill in two dryland ephemeral stream channels with sandy bed material have been measured with dense arrays of scour chains. Although the depth and areal extent of bed activity increased with discharge, active bed reworking at particular locations within the reaches resulted in downstream patterns of alternate shallower and deeper areas of scour. The variation was such that mean scour depths for individual cross sections varied about the mean for the reach by a factor of 2–4 while the locus of maximum scour traced a sinuous path about the channel centerline. The wavelength of the pattern of scour was about seven times the channel width. During each event, compensating fill returned the streambeds to preflow elevations, indicating that the streams were in approximate steady state over the period of study. Although the patterns of periodically enhanced scour along alternate sides of the channels are consistent with models of periodically reversing helical flow, further work is required to identify the causal relationships between patterns of flow and sediment transport in dryland sand bed channels

Knowledge of past and future in quantum mechanics

It is well known that the principles of quantum mechanics limit the possibilities of exact prediction as to the future path of a particle. It has sometimes been supposed, nevertheless, that the quantum mechanics would permit an exact description of the past path of a particle. The purpose of the present note is to discuss a simple ideal experiment which shows that the possibility of describing the past pathof one particlewould lead to the predictions as to the future behaviour of a second particle of a kind not allowed in the quantum mechanics. It will hence be concluded that the principles of quantum mechanics actually involve an uncertainty in the description of past events which is analogous to the the uncertainty in the prediction of future events. And it will be shown for the case in hand, that this uncertainty in the description of the past arises from a limitation of the knowledge that can be obtained by measurement of momentum

Teleportation as a quantum computation

An explicit quantum circuit is given to implement quantum teleportation. This circuit makes teleportation straightforward to anyone who believes that quantum computation is a reasonable proposition. It could also be genuinely used inside a quantum computer if teleportation is needed to move quantum information around. An unusual feature of this circuit is that there are points in the computation at which the quantum information can be completely disrupted by a measurement (or some types of interaction with the environment) without ill effects: the same final result is obtained whether or not these measurements takes place.Comment: 3 pages, LaTeX2e, PhysComp 96 submissio

Quantum Clock Synchronization Based on Shared Prior Entanglement

We demonstrate that two spatially separated parties (Alice and Bob) can utilize shared prior quantum entanglement, and classical communications, to establish a synchronized pair of atomic clocks. In contrast to classical synchronization schemes, the accuracy of our protocol is independent of Alice or Bob's knowledge of their relative locations or of the properties of the intervening medium.Comment: 4 page