Guide
How scoring works
Catamount does not ask whether you were right or wrong. It asks how close you were, and it measures closeness in a way that is fair to a question about $4.99 and to a question about 93 million miles.
Step 1: a perfect score needs a near-exact guess
Every question has a small tolerance, the room you get for a full 100 points. The tolerance depends on how big the answer is:
| Size of the answer | Allowed slack for 100 points |
|---|---|
| Up to about 200 | None. You must be exact (to the precision of the answer). |
| About 1,000 | Roughly 0.7 percent |
| About 10,000 | Roughly 1.4 percent |
| About 1 million | Roughly 3 percent |
| 1 billion and up | 5 percent, the maximum |
The idea is simple. If the question is how many stripes are on the US flag, 12 is wrong. If the question is the distance to the Moon, nobody expects you to know the last mile, so a guess within a few percent counts as a bullseye.
Step 2: outside the tolerance, you are scored by ratio
Past the tolerance, your score falls smoothly the further you are from the answer, and it falls according to the ratio between your guess and the truth, not the difference. A guess twice as high as the answer is exactly as wrong as a guess half as high. Here is roughly what that looks like for an answer with no tolerance:
| Your guess is... | Approximate score |
|---|---|
| 10 percent off | 92 |
| 25 percent off (1.25 times) | 82 |
| Twice as big, or half as big | 45 |
| Three times as big, or a third | 12 |
| 3.5 times as big, or smaller than 0.29 of the answer | 0 |
Anything short of the tolerance tops out at 99, so 100 is reserved for hitting the target. This ratio method is why the slider is logarithmic: moving it by a fixed distance always changes your guess by a fixed ratio.
Scoring years
Years are scored by the number of years you are off, because the gap between 1969 and 1979 means the same thing whether you are thinking about the moon landing or the Magna Carta. How strict the scoring is depends on how old the event is. For anything less than a century old, you need the exact year for 100 points. For older events you get a small allowance (one year for every full century of age, so a 1726 event gives you 3 years of slack). Past that, your score falls in a straight line, reaching zero when you are off by about half the age of the event. For an event from 1969, that is about 28 years; for one from 1492, about 270.
The speed bonus
Answering quickly adds a bonus worth up to 8 percent of that question's score. You get the full bonus if you lock in within 5 seconds. It shrinks in a straight line to nothing at the 20 second limit. The bonus is small on purpose: a perfect 100 earns at most 8 extra points, while being 25 percent off costs you 18. Your total is capped at 700 no matter how much bonus you collect.
The hint penalty
Using the hint takes 20 points off that question's score. If you would have scored zero anyway, the penalty does not make it negative.
From points to altitude and rank
Each point is 20 feet of altitude, so 700 points is the 14,000 feet of the summit. Your rank comes from your share of the maximum:
| Rank | Points needed | Altitude |
|---|---|---|
| Trailhead | Under 175 | Under 3,500 ft |
| Foothills | 175 to 293 | 3,500 to 5,860 ft |
| Treeline | 294 to 405 | 5,880 to 8,100 ft |
| Ridgeline | 406 to 517 | 8,120 to 10,340 ft |
| High Camp | 518 to 629 | 10,360 to 12,580 ft |
| Summit | 630 to 700 | 12,600 to 14,000 ft |
The "typical player" curve
The curve on the results screen is a simulation, not a leaderboard. We model a typical guesser who is usually in the right ballpark but often off by a factor of two or so, who answers in around ten seconds, and we run them through the same seven questions thousands of times. Where you land on that curve tells you how you compare with that typical guesser. It is not based on the scores of real people, because Catamount does not collect any.