Well, the website whizz-kids I’ve somewhat unjustifiably christened the Parcours Boys have done their work and, almost on schedule, the upgraded uniLab with the 2010 range is now live. Admittedly, before they packed up their snowboards and headed off for the next Geneva flight from City Airport, the boys still had a tweak or two left to do when it was uploaded, but overall it was fully operational and, as I hope you’ll agree, looking pretty good.
However, as I’m sure someone for whom 13 was not an unlucky number of World Championships would tell you, the day you stop trying to improve is the day you start to get worse. Therefore I (and, I know, The Big Boss) still regard uniLab as work in progress, something that could always benefit from being refined and improved.
The next question is how best so to do, and this is a matter of judgement – possibly your judgement! UniLab is designed to help you, the dart player, so it’s logical that you have a say in how it should evolve. I thus promise that all sensible comments, both positive and negative, will be gratefully accepted and carefully considered!
One point I would ask you to remember here, though, is something I said in my first Lab Oratory blog. Although it’s tempting to add lots of whistles and bells, that wouldn’t necessarily be a good idea. Whilst it’s important that uniLab offers the more experienced player a comprehensive facility, it’s also important that it be simple enough not to put off the casual user.
So, having said all that, how do I personally see uniLab being improved? Well, one thing is that we need to make sure our definitions of what constitutes a particular barrel shape or grip are in line with popular opinion across the whole range of Unicorn darts. Not all barrels can be definitively allocated to being, say, torpedo or parallel, or all grips to coarse or fine. Even I’m not entirely content with a few of the current definitions, but this is one area where the view of the majority rules and hence if you come across a definition you think is wrong, please let me know.
Which reminds me about a potentially amusing (at least I think so!) side issue. As it says on the tin, “all UniLab’s recommendations are based purely on science and are not chosen for any marketing or price considerations”. They’re also colour-blind and not in any way sexist, which means it’s quite possible that some macho man-mountain somewhere will find that the darts most aerodynamically suited to him are Striker Ladies, complete with flights in an attractive shade of pink. Wonder what are the chances of him being confident enough in his masculinity to buy some?
But returning to the subject of player feedback on uniLab, another area where it can help is in developing the “optimisation parameter”, which in the Selector function is a percentage value called the “Match”. This is made up of two parts, one measuring the aerodynamic accuracy of the dart and one measuring its stability and hence straightness of flight. Although both can be calculated purely theoretically, their relative importance is determined through rather more subjective considerations like standard of play and style of throw. This element of what we mathematicians call “empiricism” means that the combined parameter can be refined using real-world data.
So, before the next uniLab version is released, I hope to have gathered enough such data to allow me to refine the optimisation parameter still further. Bearing in mind the Optimiser function’s facility to allow for venue altitude, I certainly got some interesting feedback from a recent event in Johannesburg (c.1800m above sea-level)!
Well, that’s enough of what Hays calls my “parlance” for this time (many thanks for the encouraging comment to my last blog, Hays, even if I sometimes feel that it’s not just my vernacular that’s “almost obsolete”!). Hope you’ll all enjoy giving the new uniLab a try and by all means let me know what you think. In the meantime, what can I say but;
I’ll be back.