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Comment by Filligree | Hacker News Reader

How do you judge a poetry competition?

Playing devil’s advocate, many of the judging criteria for the sports seem pretty subjective.

For example if diving or gymnastics was purely objective, you wouldn’t need multiple judges (or any). Track and field is a lot more straightforward in most cases.

I would even go as far to say the “criteria” the judges are looking for have some analogous counterparts in poetry.

I think breakdancing was a sport for this Olympics, so poetry doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. Maybe it’s just not “exciting” to modern people?

Gymnastics and diving have had multiple judges for another reason, which is that the nominally objective portions of the judging involved spotting things at the edge of human perception. (That is, I'm discounting the obviously subjective things like "style".) The judging is definitely not just "hey, that looked good, I think I liked that 8.5 worth"; you can tell just by listening to the commentary. Things like "they're attempting an 8.6 point dive" and "that'll be two tenths off". They're often not guessing at the numbers in question, though it may be a tossup whether the human judges see the same thing the commentators did.

There has been some discussion of moving to computer vision analysis for these portions.

While one could easily judge poetry by equally objective metrics, I don't think it's hard to imagine what the result would be once the min-maxers get into the game.

    Love! love love love love love poet,
    love! hate no! love love love throw it.

    .,!.,!.,,..,,,.!!!!.,.,,.,,!!..,.!

    rhyme time lime slime mime mime love,
    a a a a a a glove

    o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o love.

I actually liked that poem!

Funny to think that the Olympics started out as LARPing ancient greece. Tradition old and new at the same time

There was a scene in the not particularly accurate First Olympics miniseries back in 1984 where the college students looked at books about the ancient Olympics and saw that the athletes competed in the nude so they came out of the building, sheepishly, in the nude and were sent back by their coach to put some clothes on.

That's fair! I still maintain my point about breakdancing, though :)

The same you judge the olympic break-dancing competition: with human juges that rate competitors based on a handful of criteria.

The criteria: 95% politics.

Your cynicism doesn't match reality.

It matches my reality perfectly, but maybe it doesn't match yours. When medals are clawed back years after the competition and awarded to the loser - there is no other explanation. And the loser with a medal they didn't win is even more of a loser.

I'm not arguing that this never happens, I'm arguing at the magnitiude:

> 95%

OK, it's 90%. Or 70%. Is that better? :)

That’s what you say when you don’t accept your defeat but it’s hard to prove. I’ve seen the finals and the Canadian guy who won was clearly better than the French one; if it were 95% politics the French would probably have won.

Just looked up videos of the first and second place medalists for breakdancing this year. It was decent, but I've seen better breakdancing in random videos taken on the streets of LA back in the 80's, for example. Or pretty much every single sequence in Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo.

It might have to do with the fact that was the very first edition at the Olympics. It may also be the last because it won’t be there at Los Angeles in 2028.

Judging by how thing goes in the Olympics and high level competition in general, probably using technical criteria. Like rhymes, meters, and form, quality of delivery with proper prononciation, rhythm and lack of hesitation, grammatical correctness, etc...

Maybe no emotion will come out of it, but writing a sonnet with perfect rime riche an two alliterations delivered with perfect pitch and with the accuracy of a metronome will certainly win gold.

when each competitor would use one of their country's official languages and poetic forms.

Fastest poem, longest poem, saddest poem etc

same way you judge anything else, it's not a science

Just like the sprint races then?

Those aren't decided by judges, they are decided by clocks. Olympic events decided by judges include things like figure skating, gymnastics, and diving.

Those events aren't decided by the judges just going on how 'cool' they think the performance was, but by comparing how close to perfect (as defined in the rule book) the techniques the athlete did was and then giving it a score based on how that technique is scored in the rule book.

The rulebook will say something like "technique A is worth 4.5 points; subtract 0.1-0.3 points if the arms aren't straight throughout the whole technique...". The judges role is then to judge if the arms where in fact straight or not. These sports are a lot more objective than people think.

And the same can be applied to poetry, no?

Rank the different poetic metres from lowest to highest score? What is objectively the hardest type of metaphors to execute perfectly? How many fewer points should a simile get compared to an equivalent metaphor? Are onomatopoeia worth any points? List all the allowed poetry topics and then given them a base difficultly score from 1-5.

Once you have finished writing the rulebook for Olympic Poetry, do you think the poetry that would result from people going through that rulebook and min-maxing their poem would actually be interesting.

I'm not suggesting that poetry should be in the Olympics, I'm just agreeing with the parent comment saying that judging could be done the same as any other Olympic sport that uses judges.

No it can't. That's GP's point. We can reason that one gymnastics skill is more technically difficult than other skill, with various degrees of certainty. We cannot reason and especially codify the same for poetry or its component parts.

What? They started giving examples of exactly how it can be codified.

Their point was that it would likely produce uninteresting poetry, not that poetry can't be judged by some set of metrics.

there are existing olympic sports with "artistic" scoring components, and poetry was already in the olympics for nearly 40 years... ya'll are overthinking this

> giving it a score based on how that technique is scored in the rule book

giving it a score based on the judge's interpretation on how the technique is scored in the rulebook — there have been plenty of unpopular interpretations over the years

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