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global find/hide ratio

paleolith

By paleolith
in General geocaching topics

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paleolith

+paleolith

Posted
Posted

Forked off from another thread because it was getting too far off topic.

I've got to say that I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about when you reference global find/hide ratios. Did I miss a memo somewhere? I tried hard but I really can't decipher the meaning of this portion of your post. Will you help me out?

Didn't I mention that there would be a quiz? :unsure: I just checked the gc.com home page. It says

 

There are 613218 active caches worldwide.

In the last 7 days, there have been 460663 new logs written by 62174 account holders.

 

So:

 

activecaches = 613218

oneweeklogs = 460663

activeusers = 62174

 

The global find/hide ratio for the week is 460663/613218 = .75122. Call it .75 since we are not talking precise data. I find it easier to think of finds per year, so multiply by 52 to get a global find/hide ratio of 39. In other words, the active caches are getting an average of 39 finds/cache/year.

 

global find/hide ratio = oneweeklogs / activecaches * 52

 

This is quite rough. It ignores the fact that not all logs are finds. However, the percentage of logs which are finds is probably fairly constant, so only a constant adjustment factor is needed. It ignores that very likely the ratio varies over the seasons; one could watch it for a year to adjust for that. None of this precision is needed for this discussion.

 

The ratio of 39 sounds pretty good compared with most of the caches I find or watch. Might be related to the fact that the average terrain rating on my finds is 2.65. :ph34r: Of course, the numbers also include caches like Four Windows, but I doubt that skews the results very much.

 

Most people will agree that, on the whole, a higher find/hide ratio is good. We like to see people finding our caches. There is probably a limit beyond which more finds isn't good -- you don't want finders constantly tripping over each other, and in some places you want to limit the trampling -- but in most places the limit is probably in the hundreds of finds per year, far more than most caches get now.

 

This is the global ratio. It does not represent any one cache. Some caches will have a higher ratio, some lower. Probably more caches have a lower ratio than higher -- the global find/hide ratio is a mean, not a median. (The median might be more interesting, but AFAIK gc.com does not publish data from which it could be derived.)

 

Almost certainly, any division of caches has a different find/hide ratio. Caches in the San Fernando Valley probably have a much higher ratio than caches in the adjacent Santa Monica Mountains. Difficulty 1 caches surely have a higher find/hide ratio than difficulty 5 caches. And so on.

 

But in general, factors which raise the global find/hide ratio also raise the ratio for individual caches. And what affects the global find/hide ratio? Based on the formula above:

 

Increasing oneweeklogs increases the global find/hide ratio.

 

Decreasing oneweeklogs decreases the global find/hide ratio.

 

Decreasing activecaches increases the global find/hide ratio.

 

Increasing activecaches decreases the global find/hide ratio.

 

It's the last that I was referring to (in my post in the "Over saturation by one cacher" thread). If you just toss a cache out there, and nothing happens to cause more finds (oneweeklogs), then the global find/hide ratio goes down. While this will be undetectable for any one particular cache, it will decrease logs on other caches. Add 200,000 caches (increasing the total by a third), and the change would be very noticeable. No one cacher is going to go out and hide 200K caches, but every active cacher hiding an additional two caches would have the same affect. (This assumes the true number of active cachers being more like 100,000, since not every active cacher logs every week.)

 

Of course the kicker -- see boldface in previous paragraph -- is that When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe. Increasing activecaches might increase oneweeklogs if 1) more caches makes it feasible for active cachers to find more caches in a week with the same effort, or 2) encourages more people to go caching. Increasing activeusers will tend to increase both oneweeklogs and activecaches, and it's hard to say how this will affect the global find/hide ratio.

 

In the Early Days, it's almost certain that increasing activecaches encouraged more people to go (or continue) caching, and thus increased oneweeklogs, probably with a multiplier effect which increased the global find/hide ratio. I haven't tried to do a study, but I expect that first-year caches averaged far fewer finds than caches today.

 

But today, it's unlikely -- at least in the parts of the world where caching is already popular -- that more caches attract more cachers. More caches might mean more finds by the same cachers, preserving the global find/hide ratio. Or it might mean that the same number of finds are distributed over more caches, lowering the global find/hide ratio. To think of it in another way, if I'm thinking of going after Sally's cache and Joe hides a nearby cache, then I might find both of them if it's convenient, resulting in a find on both -- same ratio. Or I might decide just to find Joe's new cache, since it might not be feasible to find them both, thus depriving Sally's cache of a find. (Take "deprive" lightly, since no cache is entitled to be found.)

 

To look at it in another way, there is -- like it or not -- a degree of competition among hiders for finders. I neither claim nor believe that it's a zero-sum game -- very rarely would a cache simply take away from other caches without giving anything back. But the competition is still one factor to consider.

 

So what about a cacher placing a lot of caches in a remote area -- in the case in the original thread, around Gooding, Idaho, particularly in Gooding Little City of Rocks? Will these caches just siphon activity away from other caches? Will they draw more people into caching? Will they encourage already active cachers to find caches during a vacation when they would not otherwise be caching? We know that adding caches increases activecaches, but how does it affect oneweeklogs and activeusers?

 

These aren't easy questions to answer even for lame LPCs, and certainly are hard to answer in this case. However, I think that this framework helps in considering the value of placing more caches. As I said in the original thread, I come down on the side of placing more caches in this case. One factor not quantified in the gc.com stats (nor quantifiable even in concept) is quality, particularly quality of location. Having looked up Gooding Little City of Rocks, it does look like an outstanding location with probably many interesting and hard-to-find nooks. A cacher's experience there is likely to be very good. (I'm ready to go!) Additional caches placed there are likely to draw more people to the area -- perhaps drawing them away from other areas, but perhaps enticing them to simply find more caches.

 

How does this analysis affect the caches I've hidden? Ambiguously, as always. One cache has a lot of finds by low-count cachers, so I think it's clearly in the "encouraging caching" camp. One is probably only found by people finding all the caches in a small park, so finds on it are additional logs. A series of five is found mostly by experienced cachers (and only by experienced hikers), but seems to have drawn quite a few cachers into (or back into) the area to "clean" the valley, including caches other than mine. One has only been found by experienced cachers but usually on the way to something else, and I don't think it has taken away from other caches. One is a challenge cache which has clearly encouraged finds on certain other caches, though it's still hard to evaluate its overall effect (whether it takes from other caches or enhances them).

 

So in the end, I raise at least as many questions as answers. That's not bad; my intent was not to provide answers but to present a framework for evaluating the effect of hiding more caches.

 

Edward

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AZcachemeister

AZcachemeister

Posted
Posted

I believe that each additional cache hidden will exponentially increase cache logs.

 

Given that there may be areas where a cache could be so isolated as to not entice visitors, normally there will be a certain degree of 'clustering' and that one additional cache will exceed the the threshold for certain cachers to enter the area and hunt ALL the caches therein, thus the ONE cache has been responsible for much more than one additional log. This will be an ongoing effect, as each caching team will have it's own threshold level.

 

In a similar way, that one cache may provide a needed 'bridge' to a heretofore 'too distant' cluster. This effect would be potentially observable along any number of possible vectors, I.E. the cachers to the east would be tempted to 'bridge' to the west, and the cachers to the west would be tempted to 'bridge' to the east, etc. The individual team level qualifier (as mentioned above) applies here as well.

 

Of course, there is no way to account for the fact that some teams will not log any finds online, the fact that some teams do not log DNFs, or the possibility that a certain proportion of teams won't make it home at all.

 

Other factors that are difficult to quantify given the source data:

The ratio of new hides to archivals.

The constant flux of available caches vs. disabled caches.

The difference in Ev between a Charm Quark and a Strange Quark vs. the spin direction of a random Boson.

New teams taking up the activity vs. teams dropping out.

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tozainamboku

+tozainamboku

Posted
Posted

Edward was just trying to understand why some caches get lots of finds while others are found only a few times per year. Trying to adjust for the obvious like difficulty and terrain, he seems to think that cache density has something to do with the difference. It is clear that a cluster of caches that can be found at one time (sometimes called a "power trail") will get found more than a single cache would have. But he has also seen relatively dense areas where there are many casual cachers who will search for only one or two caches in a an outing. These cachers will select a few caches out of the many to find and if there is no other difference, visits from these cachers will be split among all the caches in the area so each cache gets fewer visits than a single cache in the same area would've received. This seeming contradiction should now be called paleolith's principle:

 

The higher the density the more often a cache is found, yet the higher the density the less often each cache is found.

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