December 28, 2023

The Pickies Charter

The Pickies

1. There are two types of Pickies: the Annual Pickies and WWDC Pickies. No other Pickies shall ever be introduced.

2. The winner of the Annual Pickies is named Grand Admiral Pickerton, and retains the title for the full year.

3. The WWDC Pickies winner is named the Apple Park PrinceCupertinoSan Jose Shindig King, and retains the title until the next WWDC is held.

4. Order for Annual Pickies and WWDC Pickies is based on the winner of the previous year.

5. The winner goes second. The losers flip a coin to determine who goes first and who goes third.

6. Jason is the only person who is allowed to flip a coin, and cannot use any apps to do so.

7. James is the only person who is allowed to roll dice.

8. John may use any other method of generating random numbers that he wants.

9. To earn any points, everything written down in the prediction document for that specific pick must come true.

10. There are no half points or fractional points awarded in any round, except when grading in the event of a tie.but other fractions are allowed.

11. Three points are awarded for any pick deemed correct in the first round.

12. Two points are awarded for any pick deemed correct in the second round.

13. One point will be awarded for correct picks in the lightning round.

14. Any pick that comes true in the first half of the year is worth double.

15. The first half is defined to be the total number of seconds in each year, divided by two.

16. Your total percentage (expressed as a fraction) of wrong answers will be multiplied by five and deducted from your final score.

17. All calculations are performed using IEEE-754 floating point numbers, not integers.

18. The two other hosts must agree that at least one of your picks is “not obvious”, and one of your picksone is “pretty cool” and one is “quite sneaky”.

19. No picking things not actually unrelated to Apple or the tech industry

20. Every pick has to be related to Apple or the tech industry.

21. No picking things that the picker of the pick could make come true by themselves or by inducing others, including taking a job at Apple, or learning how to hypnotize people by becoming a magician, or ruining an entire social media company in the space of a month.

22. No picking things that are not provably true or false. Whether or not you can prove a negative is best left for the philosophers.

23. No altering the prediction document after the show is over. We all remember what happened in 2020, 2021, and 2022, and even last week, not to mention back in June.

24. In the event of a tie, all ties will be broken by the following procedure:

    1. Each lightning round pick deemed incorrect will receive a coin flip.
    2. If the coin is tails, the incorrect pick will be re-graded by the host who is not in a tie.
    3. The regrading shall be judged on the following criteria:
       1. Passion, up to 1/2 of a point.
       2. Precision, up to 1/3 of a point.
       3. Wild card, up to 1/4 of a point.
    4. After all re-grading of wrong answers is completed, the scores will be recalculated and the winner will be proclaimed.

25. The tie breaker wild card from James:

    • Roll a D100 dice, that will give a percentage value of the allowed quarter point.
    • Each player also has one point of inspiration, during this tie break, which they can spend any time during the rest of this regrading, in order to reroll the wild card dice of either themselves or for the other person.

26. In the event of a three-way tie, a three-sided die will be rolled.

    1. The winner of a coin flip between the two current non-winners of The Pickies will choose the numbers for all hosts
    2. The host whose number is rolled on the three-sided die will be eliminated.
    3. The tiebreaker will then proceed.

27. After scoring is complete, each host must place the official Pickies Refrigerator Magnets in the proper configuration on their refrigerator for the next year. Winner at the center of the door, second place in the lower left corner, third place in the lower right corner.

28. Failure to produce evidence of a properly secured magnet will result in immediate disqualification.

29. In the event that your fridge is not made from a ferrous metal, you must secure them by some other means.

30. The winner of each competition is given access to the Relay FM CMS, and will have to post the show until the next winner is revealed.

31. The losers of the competition will have to take turns doing the edit of the show each week.

32. The winner of each competition will be given access to the @wwdcshindigking and @pickiesadmiral Twitter accounts on all social media platforms currently or hereinafter devised, as appropriate.

James Thomson

John Voorhees

Jason Snell