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Skiing Is Easy, Gymnastics Is Hard: Complexity of Routine Construction in Olympic Sports

Authors James Koppel, Yun William Yu

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LIPIcs.FUN.2022.17.pdf
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Author Details

James Koppel
  • Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA
Yun William Yu
  • Computer and Mathematical Sciences, University of Toronto at Scarborough, Canada
  • Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto, Canada

Funding

  • Yu, Yun William: This work is supported by faculty startup funds from UTSC.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Aviv Adler and Quanquan Liu for comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and thank the members of the MIT Gymnastics team for fostering our love of gymnastics.

Cite AsGet BibTex

James Koppel and Yun William Yu. Skiing Is Easy, Gymnastics Is Hard: Complexity of Routine Construction in Olympic Sports. In 11th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2022). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 226, pp. 17:1-17:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2022)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.FUN.2022.17

Abstract

Some Olympic sports, like the marathon, are purely feats of human athleticism. But in others such as gymnastics, athletes channel their athleticism into a routine of skills. In these disciplines, designing the highest-scoring routine can be a challenging problem, because the routines are judged via a combination of artistic merit, which is largely subjective, and technical difficulty, which comes with complicated but objective scoring rules. Notably, since the 2006 Code of Points, FIG (International Gymnastics Federation) has sought to make gymnastics scoring more objective by encoding more of the score in those objective technical side of scoring, and in this paper, we show how that push is reflected in the computational complexity of routine optimization. Here, we analyze the purely-technical component of the scoring rules of routines in 17 different events across 5 Olympic sports. We identify four attributes that classify the common rules found in scoring functions, and, for each combination of attributes, prove hardness results or provide algorithms for designing the highest-scoring routine according to the objective technical component of the scoring functions. Ultimately, we discover that optimal routine construction for events in artistic, rhythmic, and trampoline gymnastics is NP-hard, while optimal routine construction for all other sports is in P.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation
  • Theory of computation → Problems, reductions and completeness
Keywords
  • complexity
  • games
  • sports

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