By far the best were the top compound men вЂ“ by and large their groups were very well centred and optimally placed for best score. The score loss was not confined to just the archers of lesser capability вЂ“ even some of the most capable archers did not have their groups well centred and gave away a lot of points. The women archers, both recurve and compound, gave away more points than the men. And remember, these were the best archers in the world! The greatest loss was 23 points for just one distance, and there were quite a few examples of archers giving away 10 points. While the average point loss for 36 arrows was three points, some archers gave away many more. On average, one place in the ranking round was worth about 1.2 points for the recurve archers and about 0.6 points for the compound archers. For the compound archers it is about six points for the round as they shot a 72-arrow ranking round. For the recurve archers shooting a 144-arrow round, that is an average of 12 points for the round. On average, each archer gave away about three points for every 36 arrows due to incorrect sight settings. In reality, the archers would have given away more points than our calculation showed. However, this process does under-estimate the potential score lost as we were not able to account for the archer making sight setting changes during the distance. That was able to tell us how many points the archer вЂgave awayвЂ™ by not paying sufficient attention to the group position. We were then able to move the group on the target digitally to see if the archer could have scored more by using a different sight setting. (That was a very large amount of work indeed!) Some of that processing we automated, but a large amount was undertaken manually.ДЇor each archer we calculated the position of the centre of the group and the group shape. For each target face we digitised the arrow holes and checked the digitised scores against those actually obtained by the archers. That gave us about 30,000 arrow holes to analyse. Usefully, at both the 50-metre and 30-metre distances all archers used an individual target face. I repeated the process at the 2013 World Archery Championships, held in Antalya. We also photographed those for the recurve archers after the 30-metre distance. With the kind agreement of World Archery and the event officials, my colleague Jim Larven and I photographed every target face at World Cup Stage One, 2013, held in Shanghai, after the 50-metre distance for both recurve and compound archers. Having that interest in how accurately archers set their sights, I decided to run a test. (My program is available from Pats Archery in Australia: The target face of a male There are a number of other programs available as well, and I firmly believe that archers will score more if they use one. вЂњAccurate SightsвЂќ is now widely used: the vast majority of archers in Australia use it, as well as many archers in other parts of the world. With personal computers becoming widely available, I wrote the first version of my sight setting program вЂњAccurate SightsвЂќ back in the late 1990s. However, in the 1970s it was a bit inconvenient to have to use batch processing of my computer program on a mainframe computer in order to get my settings. To do it accurately you need to take account of the geometry of the bow and sight, and allow for the aerodynamic drag of the arrow. Back in the late 1970s I worked out the mathematics for sight settings. Some readers might be aware that I have had a long-term interest in accurate sight settings. The study of target faces from Shanghai and Antalya found compound archers gave away fewer points from a mis-set sight than recurve archers

Archery software programs