I don't think we're taking into account the core problem with the voting.  Voting on
other images that are competing against yours
is a conflict of interest.  Now most of us I'm sure do try and be objective, and rate
fairly, but that doesn't mean everyone does.
The short-term desire to win can overshadow the long-term goal of a fun and fair
competition.  As the number of voters decreases the
conflict of interest will tend to make the results chaotic.  I can even think of one
way to cheat and put almost any image near the
top, although I would never do it, unless I wanted to prove it could be done.  My
point is, at core the IRTC really is more of a
community event than a competition.  The only way to get truly consistent results
would be a panel of impartial judges.  I'm not
suggesting we change the voting, just realize that it is what it is.

Andrew Wilcox

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The "Surrealism" topic certainly intimidated me, and I didn't vote
this round (panel judge) because I didn't trust my ability to judge
the topic. While I enjoy Dali's work, most surrealistic works don't
interest me. I'm thinking the judging will improve next round (not
just because I plan to vote! :-) as many others may have had the
same feeling.

That said, there are always entries that finish in the 10-20 range
that I thought should be top 3, maybe even the winner. Entrants/
artists/programmers should always be prepared for their work not
to be understood or appreciated. Nature of the game?

By the way, I toyed with entering the Surrealism round with a
warped/stretched lama. Title to be...The Dali Lama

One thought (from someone who spends most of his Spring and
Summer on a bicycle) is the voting would be easier if the images
were made available for voting as they are posted.

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Renderdog wrote:
>One thought (from someone who spends most of his Spring and
>Summer on a bicycle) is the voting would be easier if the images
>were made available for voting as they are posted.

Oops, I just realized that would never work. No one would want the
competition checking out their images before they entered, so they'd
wait to enter.

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Roberto A. wrote:
> Why don't we change the rules for voting? Can we have a "jury" winner and a
> "popular" winner?
> 
> I think that the winning entries should be chosen by a jury of 12 people,
> formed by 6 permanent judges, and the 6 winners of the previous round (or
> perhaps 6 - 3 permanent, and 3 winners of the previous round). What do you
> think? Is that feasible?
> 
> The "popular" jury would be the present mode of voting.
> 
> BTW, I vote for Gilles Tran, Jaime Vives, Txemi Jendrix and Jim Charter for
> the permanent board. :-)
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Roberto
> 
> 
I am certainly flattered to have my name mentioned for such a mission. 
  Your suggestion of distinquishing a 'popular' and a 'jury' winner does 
point up the problem that the winner, as it now stands, is the popular 
winner. ie. The one that most people can agree on for possibly 
contradictory reasons. It therefore may not exhibit the most 
originality, beauty, expressiveness, cogency or other qualities we value 
in art, independant of its popular appeal, because we can never totally 
agree on these issues.  So there is room for a "dark horse" to sneak 
through, because it draws the minimum disagreement.  The other deception 
in my view, is that just because we can assign a bunch of scores, 
average them to several decimal places, and end up with a continuous 
ranking of the images from highest to lowest, doesn't mean that we can 
truly discover the quality of the images to this degree of accuracy. 
There is some gratuitous fun perhaps in beating out another competitor 
by a couple of places but realistically we know that the relationship 
between popular ranking and artistic quality must be viewed in a much 
more general way. I think your suggestion has merit because it 
accurately points to where the artifacts now exist in the system.  But I 
find that the contest as it is structured has a rough and ready appeal 
and greater durability.  The trick is to realize where some artifacts 
may lie and take them in stride.  Meanwhile there will always be a bias 
in any permanent panel we can put together.

-Jim

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Well put. I agree with you.

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> Here's a much better idea: Start your own competition. The shortest-code
> competition was popular enough and was IIRC not an official competition.
> Just select a topic and a jury, find a little web space to post the
> images, and then announce your competition in p.gen. I'm sure you can
> get enough takers if the topic is good. You might try looking on the
> IRTC topic suggestion list for ideas.

Well, unfortunately I don't have the time for that. In fact, I'm such a
nobody on the general raytracing community that I strongly doubt anyone
would be much interested. :-) But I agree with you, there's plenty of room
for other competitions.

That was only a wild suggestion to draw ideas from to improve the current
IRTC. Take a look on Jim Charter's answer, it was pretty illustrative of the
reason behind my suggestion.

Regards!

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news:3f7395a1@news.povray.org...

> If I enter my image and get a 35th position and
> someone sends one image with ladybugs and
> stairs and get the 16th position, my conclusion
> is that something is going wrong for me.

Well, one third of the votes is between 10 and 12... and this includes your
image and the ladybugs one. It's a very narrow range after all. I'd say that
the voters just expressed the feeling that all these images were not very
distinguishable from a quality point of view.

> IMHO the winner image has nothing to do with
> the topic (and I don't want to talk about the link given by
> Gonzo in a previous post in this thread, it talks by itself).

Actually there was never any doubt for me that the winning image was the
best one. It's a great image, possibly one of the best I've seen on the
IRTC, and well above the competition. And yes, it's completely off-topic and
(possibly) done last year so that's 2 violations and on these grounds alone
it shouldn't have been allowed to run. Still, if I had voted in this round,
I probably would have voted it best picture since there's no "on-topicness"
note (the concept for this image is very good too so there's no reason to
vote it down there).

The IRTC is an open competition. This is what makes it interesting: not only
anyone can run but the voting is quite fair IMHO (little bias, little fraud,
voters are by people who care). It's simpler to administrate too, I guess.
But of course, this also allows situations like this one (off-topic image
winning) or even a situation like the Architecture round, where the winner
image was a highly professional-looking image, but also off-topic due to its
lack of content. This also leads to an awful lot of bad entries, which not
only makes viewing and voting somehow tedious but also makes the IRTC a hard
to take seriously as far as 3D competition go (hence no sponsors, for
instance).

The alternative I can see is to have a prior selection of the entries, with
a panel entitled to accept and reject images on the ground of content. This
would certainly lead to better, always on-topic images and more
consideration outside the IRTC community. But it would add a lot of overhead
on the admins (maintaining the panel, writing rejection emails...). There
would be some some bitching from the authors of rejected pictures,
accusations of partiality etc. And, of course, it would be less friendly in
general.

G.


-- 

**********************
http://www.oyonale.com
**********************
- Graphic experiments
- POV-Ray and Poser computer images
- Posters

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"Gilles Tran" <tra### [at] inapginrafr> wrote in message
news:3f748490$1@news.povray.org...
|
| Still, if I had voted in this round, I probably would have
| voted [PovPlanet] best picture since there's no "on-topicness"
| note

Technical Merit? Yes, many beautiful abstract images can be made with
seed(123) and a few while loops. I see that you're impressed with this
one, but the voting categories make it plain to me that this competition
is about the artistic as well as constructive nature of 3D images. The
frustration felt by many here is I believe caused not by simple
disagreement with the judges, but by the bewilderment caused by the
judges' fudging of the category scores.

 -Shay

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In article <3f748490$1@news.povray.org>,
 "Gilles Tran" <tra### [at] inapginrafr> wrote:
>IRTC, and well above the competition. And yes, it's completely off-topic and
>(possibly) done last year so that's 2 violations and on these grounds alone
>it shouldn't have been allowed to run. Still, if I had voted in this round,
>I probably would have voted it best picture since there's no "on-topicness"
>note (the concept for this image is very good too so there's no reason to
>vote it down there).

According to the FAQ, there *is* good reason for voting it down on 
concept/theme if the picture is not on-topic. I haven't entered in quite 
a while, but I do keep that in mind when I vote.

"The third category, concept/theme, is in some ways a contradiction--the 
more creative artists get, the less some judges think they are adhering 
to the theme.  The original name for the category was "creative 
interpretation of theme". How you interpret this category--as reward for 
creativity or punishment for failing to stick to the topic--is up to 
you."

So either way is fine, but there definitely *is* reason to vote it down 
if you think it isn't on-topic. It just isn't required--but then, 
nothing is. You can vote a high technical score because they used a lot 
of blue if you want. "They mean whatever you want them to mean, in         
general."

Jerry
-- 
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you've
depleted the lake."--It Isn't Murder If They're Yankees
(http://www.ItIsntMurder.com/)

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> ... (from someone who spends most of his Spring and
> Summer on a bicycle)....

Nice to see you here again!  I'd wondered where you had been off to, but I
had actually figured you were out bicycling (cycling?) somewhere.  For me,
it's mostly gardening that keeps me away from the computer (at home anyway)
during Spring and Summer.  Plus, it's just hard to go into the basement and
plug away when it stays light until 10:00pm all through June and July.

Real Life is more fun in the Summer, I guess.  Virtual Reality rules the
Winter...  ;-)

-- 
Jeremy

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