Reflexion time standard deviation..?

[jon7584]

What does "Reflexion time standard deviation" mean? Seen in the playing profile of Carcassonne. Thanks

[Robo65]

First of all, this seems to be a violation of BGA programming rules, because that text cannot be found in the translatable texts.

Second, that text is wrong, because the "reflexion time" should be called "thinking time" or "time to think".

That said: Standard Deviation is a statistical term. It describes how much some values deviate from their mean value. To compute it, you need to take several steps.

Let's say you have 10 values for thinking time: 3s, 10s, 5s, 1s, 30s, 2s, 1s, 3s, 11s, 2s

(1) Compute the mean value. The sum is 68s, so the mean thinking time is 6.8s.

(2) Compute the squared differences between the thinking times and the mean value. Why squared? Two reasons. One: You don't want negative values, because a negative deviation is still a deviation. Second: You want large deviations to stand out. For the first value, you'd get 14,44 as the squared difference. I'll leave the computing of the other values as an exercise for the reader. Or use Excel

(3) Find the sum of the squared differences and compute their mean value. The sum is 711.6, the mean value is 71,16. This value is called the variance.

(4) Standard deviation brings the variance back into the range of the unsquared differences by taking the square root. That's 8.44 in our sample.

In turn based games, the standard deviation of the thinking time is less relevant. But in real time games, it tells you if your opponent plays at a steady speed of if you can expect longer thinking breaks.

Robo