Well, you've got here. I don't know how. Maybe it was a search engine, or a friend pointed you in this direction. Regardless, you'll want to know about FullMonte & how you can get a copy (it's free you know).
What is it?
It's software for windows. It takes a database of your scores (for whichever target sport you're doing) & uses these scores to work out your likely performance level, as well as giving you a reasonable expectation of the limits of your good & bad days. That means that you can compare your current shooting with your past & see what's going on.
How does it work?
Well, it takes the database of scores that you have shot & uses these as the basis for a Monte Carlo simulation (this could technically be a bootstrap simulation, but that's not such a good name). Essentially, you tell FullMonte your scores for each shot you've done & the number of shots in a round/competition. It then draws randomly from the database of your scores until it has scored a whole round. It keeps the total score for that & then repeats the process... again & again. This gives a measure of the spread & potential range of your scores for the round.
You can then use this to measure the level of likelihood of your new score being unusually good/bad, or just part of the random wander in scoring. This is more relevant at the beginning of your target shooting career, when you spread the shots more widely, whereas as you get better the range of scores per shot decreases.
What do I need to run FullMonte?
How do I install it?
No need. Just unzip & run the program. No registry entries, no configuration.
How do I feed FullMonte data?
You'll need a set of scores for a given distance & target face size. If you're field shooting then you'll have to wing it here. The idea is that the scores are all of comparable origin. Comparing your ability at 18m on a 40cm archery target face with your current score for a 60cm face is very gratifying, but essentially pointless.
You then need to feed these scores into a spreadsheet, or type them into a word processor yourself. They need to be comma separated values (.csv) & must be numbers from 1 to 10 inclusive or the letter "X" (case insensitive). It will look like this:10,10,10,7,9,9
10,9,9,9,9,8
If you shoot on wierd targets that need other scores then you can let me know. Save the data with the extension .csv or .txt & then run FullMonte. Click the load button & select your data file.
How about my new score?
Well, you don't want that in your database, yet. Type the score into the box & press enter. You'll get a percentage of your potential scores displayed. For scores above your average the lowest value if the one you want to look at. Anything over 95 is "statistically significant" & probably represents a major leap in performance. For scores below par you need to look at the highest value. Anything below 5% is trouble indeed.
If you click the compare button you can load a second data file. This one being for... comparison with your standard database. This allows you to compare your current round with those that went before.
I'm not good at maths!
Try the graph option then. You get a display of your potential scores, with their likelihood being shown by the height of the curve. There are 2 markers, at 97.5 & 2.5%, which are the extremes of your "normal" performance. Incidentally, these show an interesting optical illusion - they don't look vertical, but they are! If you loaded a data file for comparison you'll see it displayed here.
Of course, if you want to you can also make the graphs pretty & save them as a .bmp file
My graph is all lumpy!
It takes a lot of trials (runs) before the random variations in score smooth themselves out into a nice curve. Increase the number of iterations (from the parameters menu). You'll need to click the re-run button afterwards. If the number of iterations is on the small side then you may see some change in the breakpoints for the percentages, this is normal.Anything else I should know?
Two things. Firstly, I wrote this to deal with indoor archery scores, so it's set to default to 60 shot rounds. You'll need to set this number in the parameters section if you want a different number. Secondly, the X scores are given in the right hand column of the main window. These count as 10, but matter for tie breaks. The scoring system rates 500 with 10X as worse than 501 with 1X (just like the judges). This can look a little strange when you look at it the first few times. If you don't have Xs then don't worry, the values will stay at 0. The graph function ignores them too.
Where is (fill in favourite missing feature)?
Waiting to be written! You'll notice that this is still officially beta software. The to-do list is currently suspended but will include: