Release velocities and bowler performance in cricket

There is a widespread notion in the cricketing world that with increasing pace the performance of a bowler improves. Additionally, many cricket experts believe faster bowlers to be more effective against lower order batters than bowlers who bowl at slower speeds. The present study puts these two ubiquitous notions under test by statistically analysing the differences in performance of bowlers from three subpopulations based on average release velocities. Results from one-way ANOVA (and its modified versions), for international test matches, reveal faster bowlers to be performing better, in terms of Average and Strike-rate, but no significant differences in the Economy rate and Dynamic Bowling rate. Faster bowlers were found to be more effective in taking wickets of lower and middle order batters as compared to bowlers with less pace. However, there was no statistically significant difference in performance of Fast and Fast-Medium bowlers against a top-order batter.     

Minimum failure explanations for path vector routing changes

Path vector protocols in routing networks convey entire path information to each destination. When links fail, affected paths are replaced by new paths, and by observing the entire path information, one might hope to infer the failed links that caused these changes. However, inferring the exact topological changes behind observed routing changes may not be possible due to limited information, and the same changes may be explained by more than one set of candidate failures. In this paper, using a simple path vector routing model, we present the problem of finding the candidate set with minimum number of failures to explain observed route changes. We call this problem the minimum e-set problem and present algorithms for solving it optimally for certain cases. We also show that the minimum e-set problem is NP-complete in the general case. This material is based upon work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Contract No N66001-04-1-8926 and by National Science Fundation(NSF) under Contract No ANI-0221453. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the DARPA or NSF. Part of the work was done when Akash Nanavati was at DA-IICT, India