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necessarian) wrote2020-09-05 01:54 pm
necessarian) wrote2020-09-05 01:54 pm
Entry tags:
a mathematical interlude
there are 4 quidditch teams at hogwarts
assume 7 players per team + 3 reserves to average it out to a tidy 10 players per team
gives 40 quidditch playing students at hogwarts at any given time
with 6 grades playing quidditch, that's 40 / 6 = roughly 6-7 students playing quidditch in each grade
(assuming an unweighted final distribution, e.g. by 7th year every quidditch-playing student has made it onto a team at some point)
so let's round up and assume 7 quidditch players graduate each year
there are 13 teams in the british & irish quidditch league
each of those teams needs at least 10 players, so that's 130 players across the league
so with 7 players graduating into those teams each year, the age spread of professional quidditch is 18 to 130 / 7 + 18 ~= 37
because otherwise they literally would not have enough players to sustain the league!
post-mortem: thankfully this is just about realistic for a stamina and reflex-based sport, but it does raise some questions such as: how often are new players drafted into the league? if it's every year, then only a maximum of 7 out of 13 teams get a new player. but it's not inconceivable that multiple new players might go to the same team, and there'd also be natural variance in the number of players each year.
do they have anything in place to standardise this? i think a one-in one-out model would be unsustainable. you would need something in place to assure that the skill level and age balance of each team stays roughly even across the league. unless, in true hp fashion, it's total anarchy. but each team does still need to have that minimum of 7 players (and our 3 hypothetical reserves) to sustain their participation in the league, and you also need to be able to account for players retiring before ~37 for injury/family reasons - then again i guess they do have magic to take care of injuries? anyway the numbers just about make sense, but we're kind of pushing the limits of credulity.
if i were making this neater i'd pull it down to 12 teams in the league; nice and even for bracketing, and giving us just a little more leeway in spreading quidditch players across the teams. e.g. instead you'd have 120 players across the league, and a marginally younger retirement age.
like seriously how the hell do you do bracketing with 13 teams
assume 7 players per team + 3 reserves to average it out to a tidy 10 players per team
gives 40 quidditch playing students at hogwarts at any given time
with 6 grades playing quidditch, that's 40 / 6 = roughly 6-7 students playing quidditch in each grade
(assuming an unweighted final distribution, e.g. by 7th year every quidditch-playing student has made it onto a team at some point)
so let's round up and assume 7 quidditch players graduate each year
there are 13 teams in the british & irish quidditch league
each of those teams needs at least 10 players, so that's 130 players across the league
so with 7 players graduating into those teams each year, the age spread of professional quidditch is 18 to 130 / 7 + 18 ~= 37
because otherwise they literally would not have enough players to sustain the league!
post-mortem: thankfully this is just about realistic for a stamina and reflex-based sport, but it does raise some questions such as: how often are new players drafted into the league? if it's every year, then only a maximum of 7 out of 13 teams get a new player. but it's not inconceivable that multiple new players might go to the same team, and there'd also be natural variance in the number of players each year.
do they have anything in place to standardise this? i think a one-in one-out model would be unsustainable. you would need something in place to assure that the skill level and age balance of each team stays roughly even across the league. unless, in true hp fashion, it's total anarchy. but each team does still need to have that minimum of 7 players (and our 3 hypothetical reserves) to sustain their participation in the league, and you also need to be able to account for players retiring before ~37 for injury/family reasons - then again i guess they do have magic to take care of injuries? anyway the numbers just about make sense, but we're kind of pushing the limits of credulity.
if i were making this neater i'd pull it down to 12 teams in the league; nice and even for bracketing, and giving us just a little more leeway in spreading quidditch players across the teams. e.g. instead you'd have 120 players across the league, and a marginally younger retirement age.
like seriously how the hell do you do bracketing with 13 teams
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The other problem is that I think JKR's math is dodgy af :P There are maybe four muggleborns in Harry's cohort, with most either being half-bloods or purebloods. If you go with her original 40 kids per year calculation and you...adjust for all the Slytherins being purebloods what you get is 10 pureblood kids in Slytherin and if you have just 2 pureblood kids scattered across the other houses, that's 16 pureblood kids in total i.e. 32 wizard parents + 20 wizard parents from the other side (on average, only because Harry's still a half-blood despite Lily being a witch). That's 52 wizard parents for one class which is already 14,560 wizards with kids in school at any given time. If you include the fact that all 32 wizard parents of purebloods have magical parents that gets you 64 magical grandparents alive for any given cohort of kids! That's over 7000 magical grandparents ONLY for just the pureblood kids in Hogwarts at any given time, which gives us 21,728 wizards who have kids or grandkids in Hogwarts at any time.
This does not account for witches or wizards who don't have kids (which doesn't seem insubstantial judging by the sheer number of canonically single adults from the UK in the HP books - McG, Dumbledore, Snape, Sirius, Hagrid, Umbridge; as well as the ones who seem unattached e.g. most of the Hogwarts teachers, Ludo Bagman, Kingsley, Moody, Charlie), or witches and wizards with kids who are out of school but too young to have their own kids or with kids aged 1 - 10 - that's way more than a 1/1000 ratio could feasibly fit (i.e. ~57,000 witches & wizards in 1991) BUT could you really hide a larger population ratio the way they're supposed to? WHO KNOWS. I think JKR's demographics and population math is dodgy as hell and that alone, is cause, to be able to do things any way one wants.
..............and that's without accounting for witches and wizards who study at Beauxbatons or Durmstrang (as Draco nearly did) :P
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but yeah jkr's maths is so unbelievably dodgy i think we absolutely can excuse ourselves for fudging the numbers where possible, and with glee