Deshawn from Survivor 41, the first player (hopefully the last) to ever participate in the “Do or Die” twist In season 41 of Survivor, there were a lot (and I mean A LOT) of new twists introduced into the game. One twist that sparked a lot of conversation, analysis, and mathematical breakdown was something called the “Do or Die” twist. The twist worked as follows. At the...
This post was written by Amanda Rabinowitz and me (Sean Falconer). Murmurs that the game of Survivor is more difficult for non-White contestants have been with the show since its early seasons. Survivor’s first Black winner, S4’s Vecepia Towrey, discussed issues of race with fellow contestant Sean Rector in a scene that was groundbreaking television in 2002 and remains resonant today. Vecepia and...
This post was written by Amanda Rabinowitz and me (Sean Falconer). We recently took a close look at the gender discrepancy in finding hidden immunity idols and its impact on women’s likelihood of winning Survivor. While the gender-gap in idol finding is stark and appears to coincide with poorer odds for female players, this is just one small piece of how gender can affect a complex social...
This post was co-authored by myself (Sean Falconer) and Amanda Rabinowitz. In Survivor’s most recent season, David vs Goliath, Angelina Keeley was the first contestant to call out on air the gender divide amongst idol finders. She stated that only 15% of idols are found by women. As many predicted, Angelina’s comment foreshadowed her own eventual idol find later in the game, making her only the...
I’m super late to the party this year, but I finally have some Survivor Season 37 rankings up! Below are rankings from Week 1 through Week 12 based on a machine learning approach I started back in Season 35. If this is your first time here, you can read all about the details of the project here. The quick and dirty version is that we use volunteers to collect data about player behaviors on...
It’s time for another season of Survivor and that means I’ll be back each week to discuss what machine learning has to stay about the potential winner of the season. If this is your first time here, you can read all about the details of the project here. The quick and dirty version is that we use volunteers to collect data about player behaviors on an episode by episode basis, then...
In my last post, I discussed a large Survivor-related project that I’m involved in where we have volunteers code episodes of Survivor by the observed behaviors that player’s exhibit. You can read all about that project here. One of the potential applications of this crowdsourced data is using machine learning models to predict winners. All the nitty gritty details are in my original...
A little over a year ago, I was contacted by Angie Caunce about participating in a data project related to Survivor. If you are a fan of RHAP, you’ll likely know who Angie is. She is the creator of The System, or the Angie Caunce Character Types, which I have written about before. I also built a website for this system CaunceTypes where you can explore every player of Survivor based on her...
With all the great pre-season Survivor coverage happening on RHAP, I was inspired to do my own pre-season project. We have all witnessed the awesome power of “Nicoletradamus” when it comes to winner picks, but what about predicting the “dateability” (i.e. whether a contestant makes the merge) of Survivor contestants? To address this age old question, I went back through...
During the last two voicemail shows on Rob Has A Podcast, Rob Cesternino and his co-host have discussed the question, “What winner of Survivor had the largest net worth prior to their win?“ In this blog post, I explain how I came up with the answer of Yul Kwon, winner of Survivor Cook Islands. Before I dive too deeply into my research, I want to setup why this question is interesting...
