[EM] Guardian 100 Best Novels

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 2026-05-19 22:03, Ross Hyman wrote:
> I thought the score would be of the form approval - weight*(rank sum)
> as well but this is incompatible with My Antonia (approvals=4, total
> rank = 4+5+10+5=24) at #100 and Left Hand of Darkness (approvals=4,
> total rank = 8+7+10+9 = 34) at #84.
> Even rank dependent weights can't help because each individual rank on
> Darkness is lower or equal to a corresponding rank of Antonia.
> If one removes books not in the top 100, the total rank for Antonia is
> 2+4+9+5 = 20, and for Darkness it is 7+5+5+7= 24. Darkness is still
> lower ranked. But now there is the possibility that they choose
> weights on the individual ranks in such a way as to make Antonia
> lower, such as making the score for 9 count as 14. But that would be
> weird.

The really weird part is that the results are so close. If you create a 
custom method (e.g. a Nanson hybrid or something with non-Borda 
positional weights), you'd expect it to disagree more than once, but...

I ran the full data set through the solver and it found that
	31 * approvals - rank sum
(unless there's a bug) matches the order for every book except for My 
Antonia up to tie-breaking. However, if My Antonia's Approval count is 
lowered to three, then it, too, matches.

More specifically, near the end, after excluding ties, we have

Vote count	Rank sum	Desired rank
4		34		89	// The Left Hand of Darkness
3		7		90	// Jacob's Room
3		10		91	// Life and Fate
3		11		92	// Sentimental Education
3		12		95	// The Return of the Native
3		13		96	// Pedro Páramo
3		14		99	// The Go-Between
4		24		100	// My Ántonia

These appear to have decreasing vote counts and increasing rank sums 
within the same vote count bracket, except for My Antonia at the very 
end. But 24 > 14, so if it were counted as 3 instead, we would get the 
proper order.

This is quite odd. Maybe there's a bug in their software? It's hard to 
imagine a method that's not weighted Approval,Borda but is *that* close.

About the only thing I can think of is if their tie-breaker is defined 
as some ranking of every candidate submitted, that they add some 
multiple of the tie-breaker rank to the score. Then My Antonia could be 
at the very end, so that its rank sum pushes it down; but this feels 
kind of arbitrary -- why would it affect *just* My Antonia and not 
overturn any of the other non-tied results?

The tie-breaker doesn't seem to be strictly alphabetical either. 
Catch-22, The Road, and The Go-Between all have the same Approval and 
vote counts (namely (3, 14)), but they're listed in that order, whereas 
a tie-breaker would put The Go-Between second and The Road third of the 
three.

-km