Hugo 2023 Stats: The One-Sixtieth Solution

camestrosfelapton

February 5

I do like learning things and there is a goldmine in this comment from last week from Peter Wilkinson and also in the EPH post from David Wallace.

Some arithmetic first. With EPH each voter gets their one vote divided between the nominees they list. If you only list 1 then thats 1/1=1 points per nominee, 2 then 1/2=0.5 points, 3 then 1/3=0.3333etc, 4 then 1/4=0.25 and 5 then 1/5=0.2. In decimal the 1/3 points is a bit of a mess because as a decimal fraction you have all those 3's.

Recurring fractions can be an issue in binary as well and so even sophisticated computers can have rounding errors. There are also basic process errors we can make when doing calculations. Round an answer to early and you can end up with sizeable errors in your data. Also, there are different conventions on how to round decimals for different purposes. A normal one is to round up 5's e.g. 0.125 to 2 decimal places is normally shown as 0.13 but that can add a tiny bias upwards.

In short, if you can, it is better to avoid fractions altogether and work with integers and converting everything at the end. With EPH there is a neat trick. All the fractional parts have to sums of 1/2,1/3,1/4 or 1/5. The common denominator is 60, so instead of giving everybody 1 point to be divided by nominees, you can give them 60 points and then all you have is biggish whole numbers. You are happy, the computer is happy, the general public...well "give everybody 60 points each" is just another weird rule to explain. However, we can just divide by 60 RIGHT AT THE END and it is all good. Any rounding won't effect the result and is just a convenience for showing the numbers.

EPH stats have been conventionally shown to 2 decimal places. The are exactly 99 two-digit decimal numbers from 0.01 to 0.99. However, there are only 59 two-digit decimal numbers that are roundings of a fraction out of 60 from 0.02 (i.e. 0.0166666 etc) to 0.98 (i.e. 0.98333333 etc).

With me so far?

This gives us a way of looking at published stats. It doesn't tell us what has occurred but it will show when the EPH stats have been calculated differently then normal. It might be just at the final stage of displaying the stats e.g. maybe somebody just truncates the numbers and shows 1/60 as 0.01 instead of 0.02. However, it could be something else.

I was given a file of digitised EPH results from 2020 to 2023. For every cell in each row of data I calculated a spreadsheet formula of the form =cell - INT(cell). What this does is just leave behind the two-digit fractional part. Then I can get the spreadsheet to classify every non-blank or zero cell as either Y (it is on the list of sixtieth fractions) or N (it isn't). Finally, I can coun't up the number of N's in a row to highlight nominees with issues.

Again, we can't know the source of the issue by itself. and it can be 100% cosmetic and had zero impact on the outcome.

First, here all all the rows with issues from 2022 and 2021

[That's an empty table]

OK here is 2023:

Category	Finalist	CountN
Novel	Legends & Lattes	1
Novel	Nona the Ninth	4
Novel	The Daughter of Doctor Moreau	2
Novella	A Prayer for the Crown-Shy *	1
Novelette	The Space-Time Painter	9
Novelette	Color the World	5
Novelette	A Dream of Electric Mothers	3
Novelette	Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold **	3
Novelette	We Built This City	3
Short Story	On the Razor's Edge	4
Short Story	Rabbit Test	1
Short Story	D.I.Y.	1
Short Story	The White Cliff	1
Short Story	Zhurong on Mars	1
Short Story	Fongong Temple Pagoda*	7
Short Story	Resurrection	5
Short Story	Lonely Room	1
Short Story	Memories in Snow	2
Short Story	2039: Era of Brain Computer	1
Graphic Story	Chivalry《骑士精神》	4
Related Work	Chinese Science Fiction, An Oral History《中国科幻口述史》	1
Related Work	Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road《血汗与铬：疯狂的麦克斯狂暴真实故事：狂暴之路》	6
Related Work	History of Chinese Science Fiction in the 20th Century《20 世纪中国科幻小说史》*	2
Related Work	Buffalito World Outreach Project《小水牛出海计划》	4
DPLF	Everything Everywhere All at Once《瞬息全宇宙》	6
DPSF	Andor: Rix Road《安多：立斯路》	3
EditorLF	Lee Harris 李·哈里斯	9
EditorLF	Lindsey Hall 林赛·霍尔	5
EditorLF	Yan Huan 颜欢	5
EditorLF	Ruoxi Chen 陈若熹	1
EditorLF	Sarah Peed 莎拉·皮德	1
EditorLF	Yao Haijun 姚海军	1
EditorSF	Sheree Renee Thomas 雪莉·蕾妮·托马斯	1
EditorSF	Wang Xu 汪旭	1
EditorSF	Yang Feng 杨枫	1
EditorSF	Latssep 拉兹	1
Fan Writer	Paul Weimer *	3

It looks like a lot but there are actually more that have 0 issues, but remember 60% of 2 decimal place numbers fit the Y criteria regardless. As Peter Wilkinson pointed out Editor Long Form as a lot of anomalies. In Novel, for once we have a weirdness that doesn't impact Babel.

Paul is listed but other high-profile "ineligibles" aren't although "Fonggong Temple Pagoda" is. "Space Time Painter" won Novelette and faced a backlash among Chinese fans and has the most number of anomalouse values.

However, 2023 isn't the only year with some anomalies by this approach. 2020 has a few quirks also.

Category	Finalist	CountN
Novel	A Memory Called Empire Arkady Martine	4
Novel	Gideon the Ninth Tamsyn Muir	4
Novel	The Raven Tower Ann Leckie	3
Novella	This Is How You Lose the Time War Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone	4
Novella	To Be Taught, If Fortunate Becky Chambers	3
DPLF	Captain Marvel	2
DPLF	Good Omens	2