Find the Best, Tournament-Style

 

Choices can be tough.

Sometimes you have a dozen wonderful choices in front of you, but you have to choose only one.  To solve this problem, you can look to sports.

In sports, you have many teams.  When you look at the professional world of sports, every team is world-class.  How do you pick out the best team of the year?  You have a tournament.

Whenever I have to find the best of a group of things, I make my own tournament.  My favorite technique is what I call 16-1.  Assemble groups of 16 things.  The things can be anything—books, apps, songs, photographs, whatever.  Then make a first pass through your list of 16, comparing two items at a time.  For each set of two items, ask yourself, “which is better?”  Assign the winner a 1-0 score, and the loser a 0-1 score.

Now order your 0-1 group randomly, and make a second pass through only the loser group.  Again, you compare them two items at a time.  Assign the winners a 1-1 score, and the losers a 0-2 score.  You can remove your 0-2 items from contention.

Do a second pass on your 1-0 group.  Assign winners a 2-0 score and losers a 1-1 score.

Now you have 12 items remaining.  Time to do the third pass.  Randomly sort your 1-1 group and then compare them two items at a time.  Winners get a 2-1 score.  Losers get removed from contention (because they have two losses).

Do a third pass on the 2-0 group.  Winners go 3-0, while losers get put in the 2-1 group.  Now you have two items in the 3-0 group and 6 in your 2-1 group.

Do a fourth pass.  You will end up with one 4-0 item, and four 3-1 items.  At this point, you can either decide on your 4-0 item as the best, or you can do a fifth pass on your 3-1 group.  After a fifth pass, you will end up with your top three.  Go with your instinct and pick your favorite out of the three.

A variation of this is to do a triple elimination tournament.  This is useful when all of the choices seem great because it reduces the chances that you “accidentally” remove one of the best choices from contention.

A tool I find useful whenever I need to randomize something is Random.org.