Scores are deciphered as follows: Divide your score by 8 (integer division, leaving a remainder). Your real score is the remainder of this division minus double the quotient. An example or two will clarify:
Suppose your initial score is 7. 7 divided by 8 = 0; remainder 7, so your real score is 7 - (2*0) = 7, which is the highest score possible (naturally so, as there are 7 questions). This means that you have gotten 7 questions right and none wrong.
Say your initial score is 15: 15 divided by 8 = 1 R 7, so your real score is 7 - (2*1) = 5. If your initial score is 34, your real score is 2 - (2*4) = -6.
You can think of the original number as a two digit number in base 8. The "ones digit" holds the number of correctly answered questions. The "8s digit" holds the number of incorrectly answered questions. That's why every incorrect answer is multiplied by 8. More generally, it is multiplied by 1 + the total number of questions, in this case 7. That prevents ambiguity in the final score.
The reason for the "double the quotient" part, is that, since for the most part these questions all have only two plausible answers (which are usually both stated explicitly in the question), once you get an answer wrong with your first guess, there is little point in waiting to see if you get it right with your second guess, so I decided to save time by having wrong answers count as both the wrong answer and the right answer. You end up gaining one point for the "right answer" and losing two for the wrong answer (that you actually guessed), which is effectively the same thing as losing a point for the wrong answer and not being allowed to guess again.
There are a number of drawbacks to this method, including the fact that all possible "wrong answers" have to be entered individually by hand (to Sporcle, they are exactly the same as "right answers") and that the number of entries required to store all potential combinations of right answers and wrong answers |
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