> If any kind of money is at stake, you had better be able to prove that
your
> system gives all players a truly EQUAL chance to win. In any polled
system,
> there will be a latency between when a button is pressed, and when it is
> detected. If button A is pressed first, but just missed it's poll slot,
and
> button T gets pressed many time slots later, but in time to be seen before
> A, you have a legal problem. And what do you do if you DO see A & T appear
> simultaneously in a scan?
>
> Those few milliseconds difference are all a good lawyer would need to win
> damages from you should a losing player wish to dispute the fairness
> of the quiz buttons. Given the litigious nature of US citizens, you'd
better
> make certain you butt is covered. It is not enough that you say that your
system
> is fair. You have to be able to -prove- that is, in a courtroom,
particularly
> when athletic events are now being timed to milliseconds because so much
> money is interested in the outcome.

Since the slaves each send the time at which the button was pressed, which
could be to a very high resolution indeed, and the master doesn't pick a
winner until seeing all the slaves times, we can get pretty close to
'perfect' in this regard, probably to a level where the differences in the
switches in the slaves is larger than the software error.

Even without this feature, and perhaps useful in deciding 'ties',  remember
that by nature a round-robin polling system is 'fair' in the sense that no
one transmitter gets a  generalized advantage. Unfortunately, this only
applies if all the transmitters time slots are equally distributed around
the 'ring'. Of course, as originally designed, the master's transmission
will distort this distribution. There are a couple of solutions that come to
mind:

1: Have the master transmit between every slave timeslot. This can now be
more of a poll-response system. This has the disadvantage of wasting a lot
of time on the master's transmissions.

2: Reverse the order of the timeslots for every other iteration.
Alternatively you can rotate the timeslots one position on each iteration.

I dare say that were this system to be challenged legally, that by showing
the effort expended to make everything fair you would have a pretty solid
defense.

On the other hand, some sort of a disclosure and disclaimer signed by the
competitors sounds like it might be a good idea.

Bob Ammerman
RAm Systems

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