Patterns · Already there

Do those who were already here score differently?

Of today's entrants, 521 already carried a stamp older than 2026-08-12. They are compared against those who arrived later.

2026-08-12 is NOT a date from the contest: it is the day this panel started keeping snapshots. The cohort does not say «entered early», it says «was already there the first time we looked», which is a statement about us and not about the contest.

And the stamp is the last upload, not the sign-up: there is no way to tell whether the higher scorer uploaded earlier or simply has more years behind them.

This is the only page here that exists only because of the archive. With the 31 snapshots kept, 521 people fall on the older side; looking at today's snapshot alone, 420. The 101 difference are people whose older stamp the source had already overwritten when they uploaded again.

Class	Already there	Arrived later	Their median	The other side	Difference	Shuffles that reach it
FORMULA 100	243	525	144	119	25	0 / 2,000
UNLIMITED	156	352	195	159	36	0 / 2,000
LIMITED	63	117	160	141	19	514 / 2,000
FORMULA UNLIMITED	34	43	187	142	45	39 / 2,000

As in Classes: the labels are shuffled 2,000 times and the shuffles reaching the observed difference are counted. The column stays raw because zero of 2,000 and four hundred of 2,000 are not the same, and a threshold would equate them.

A class is left out if either side has fewer than 20 people.

More days do not fix the main thing: the boundary will stay at 2026-08-12 forever, because that is the day we started keeping snapshots.