Creating a leaderboard and scoring system

Hello and sorry if my question might sound hard to understand at first!

Me and some coursemates went flying on a uni simulator which gave us different parameters under the form of arrays ( for example, altitude, time etc)

We had to create a program that takes those parameters, plots them into graphs and determines who was the best pilot.

I thought about using a scoring system similar to the ones in games, where at the end of each evaluation the data will be sorted in a hierarchical way.

For example taking the Altitude/Time graph, I had to determine the area underneath that graph, which I found out using the trapz function, afterwards I sorted ascending all that data, and the pilot with the smallest area is declared the winner of that round. All fun and games until here... -ish.

We were 6 pilots, therefore place 1 received 5 points, place 2 received 4 points etc place 6 received 0 points. I want that each pilot to receive a variable ( For example, lets call a pilot John) that is equal to 0 at the beginning. If john won 3rd place, he has to receive therefore 3 points. I dont know how to create this, as all I did was just compute that area and sort it. I dont know how to assign each pilot that area and how to give him those points.

Here is some of my coding:

plot(time_1,alt_1,'r');
plot(time_2,alt_2,'b');
plot(time_3,alt_3,'g');
plot(time_4,alt_4,'y');
plot(time_5,alt_5,'k');
plot(time_6,alt_6,'m');
title('Altitude variation over time');
xlabel('Time(s)');
ylabel('Altitude(m)');
legend('Andrei','Mauro','John','Khalid','Melbin','Sully')
hold off;
area1=trapz(time_1,alt_1);
area2=trapz(time_2,alt_2);
area3=trapz(time_3,alt_3);
area4=trapz(time_4,alt_4);
area5=trapz(time_5,alt_5);
area6=trapz(time_6,alt_6);
area_array=[area1,area2,area3,area4,area5,area6];
area_sorted=sort(area_array,'ascend');
area_sorted;

Help would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

[Derek Michaelis]

If you ever have trouble with sorting listed items on matlab, I put a more universal guide down below this one! It's much shorter.

Although it is probably way to late to help you, I see there are some people still veiwing this question. It may seem like a lot of code to do this small task but the majority was just copy and past, or just using the replace tool (in ctrl f) a few times after typing a couple lines. Either way, if you have a lot more in a list than just 6 that you need to sort out, then I would definatly recomend this over brute forcing it.

% in this section I just mached the people up with their area under the curve
Andrei = area_array(1);
Mauro = area_array(2);
John = area_array(3);
Khalid = area_array(4);
Melbin = area_array(5);
Sully = area_array(6);

% I used a for loop so it would cycle through all the peoples placings and give me a changing variable to work with
for k=1:1:6
% if you didn't understand why I was setting there names to equal the values earlier it was so that after it was 
% sorted we have a way to cancel out there original values leting us know if it matches a sorted value
    if area_sorted(k)/Andrei==1 
        AndreiScore=AndreiScore+6-k; %here is where I calculated their points they got making it so you could add it to priviously gotten points
        fprintf('\nAndrei is number %i and has a score of %i points\n',k,AndreiScore)
    elseif area_sorted(k)/Mauro==1 %the rest of this I just copied and pasted and replaced the names  
        MauroScore=MauroScore+6-k;
        fprintf('\nMauro is number %i and has a score of %i points\n',k,MauroScore)
    elseif area_sorted(k)/John==1
        JohnScore=JohnScore+6-k;
        fprintf('\nJohn is number %i and has a score of %i points\n',k,JohnScore)
    elseif area_sorted(k)/Khalid==1
        KhalidScore=KhalidScore+6-k;
        fprintf('\nKhalid is number %i and has a score of %i points\n',k,KhalidScore)
    elseif area_sorted(k)/Melbin==1
        MelbinScore=MelbinScore+6-k;
        fprintf('\nMelbin is number %i and has a score of %i points\n',k,MelbinScore)
    else
        SullyScore=SullyScore+6-k;
        fprintf('\nSully is number %i and has a score of %i points\n',k,SullyScore)
    end
end

Also, for others who are having similar problems, and you just want to put them in order in a list on matlab and that is it, then it can be a bit shorter...

NameA = List_Of_Numbers_Before_Sorting(1)
NameB = List_Of_Numbers_Before_Sorting(2)
Name... = List_Of_Numbers_Before_Sorting(...)
...

Sorted_List = sort(List_Of_Numbers_Before_Sorting)   %if you want it to decend instead it sould still work

for k = 1 : 1 : Number_Of_People_On_The_List
    if Sorted_List(k) / NameA == 1
        fprintf('NameA, ')
    
    elseif Sorted_List(k) / NameB == 1
        fprintf('NameB, ')    
        
    elseif Sorted_List(k) / Name... == 1
        fprintf('Name..., ')
        
    ...
    
    else
        fprintf('Name...')
    end 
end

This will give you a list of the words in the right order and the only thing separaiting them will be commas and spaces, if you want every word on a new line just inclued "\n" instead of the ", " in the fprintf lines.