Friday, October 26, 2012

Bowling a Perfect Game


The gang at work did a team build thing. We went to a local bowling alley to shoot the breeze, eat pizza, and bowl a few games. I'd sprained my right wrist earlier in the month, and it was still a bit sore. I've bowled left handed in the past, but it's pretty dismal. Still, this is team building, not a real competition. My strategy was to try it right handed, and if it got too painful, i'd switch hands. The expectation was that each game would get worse. The sprain is by the pinky. The result was that i have no aim. It was sort of random, like Brownian pool. However, my scores were 85, 95, and 124.

The high point of the first game was that in frame six, i was tied for last place. That was the only time during the game that i wasn't alone in last place. In the ninth frame of the second game, i'd achieved 75. To equal my first game, i'd need to score 10. The only way to achieve that would be to bowl a spare and a gutter ball. See if you can figure out how i managed twenty in the tenth frame. That last game wasn't really better than the first two, except for three spares in a row, followed by a strike. I plugged the game scores into a spread sheet, and added a quadratic curve fitting trend line. The line goes right through the actual scores. It shows that by game six, i'm bowling 300 - a perfect game. Clearly, i should have played three more games. The math doesn't lie!

Curiously, the wrist felt much, much better (not worse) the next day. Who'd have guessed that?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

bowling is a one of the perfect indoor game to play. nowadays bowling is a has become one of the most played games.
Bowling Club Sydney

Stephen said...

Just to repeat my spam policy. If it's on-topic, it isn't spam. If it's off-topic, i delete it. I do have a post where i talk about spam, so you can post your comment spam there.