Today, a German TV casting show ("Unser Star Fur Baku") introduced a new "real-time" voting system that works as follows:
10 contestants take part in a song competition. Viewers can call in and vote for their favorite candidate. By the end of the show, the 5 participants with the highest scores advance to the next round (broadcast next week), the rest drop out.
The great "novelty" of the show is that the real-time voting results (percentages) are visible on-screen during the entire show, i.e. viewers can immediately react (call in) when their favorite is in danger of dropping out of the top 5.
By the end of the show, the result table looked like this:
15.5%
14.9%
14.7%
14.7%
14.7%
--------------------- candidates below this line drop out of the contest
14.5%
5.9%
2.4%
1.4%
1.0%
Shortly before the end of the voting phase, positions 1-6 were fluctuating wildly (except maybe position 1 who was some kind of girl-whisperer).
I wonder if this voting procedure is essentially bogus, creating a more or less random ordering of the contestants as an artifact of the feedback loop...
My questions:
- Was it to be expected that the table would look like this (first 6 candidates having practically identical scores)?
- Why the first six (maybe due to something like "struggle for position 5")?
- Is there any special significance to the number 14% (=100 % / 7)?
- Could it be that the 6 top positions are picked more or less randomly, from chaotic fluctuations in the beginning phase that tend to self-enforce?
Sorry if this is not a valid question, or wrongly tagged (maybe it's more about psychology than math)... I just saw this and really wondered how sound that procedure was, and if the result table will look practically identical next week (same voting system).