CDSS History

In mid 1993 Michael Thill asked me to develop a computer scoring system to use at an Event he was organising at Werribee Park, Victoria — The Australian Carriage Driving Classic. This was a curious request for three reasons:

• I knew nothing about Scoring
• I knew very little of the rules
• I thought he liked me.

Up until this time I had been on the fringe of Driving (about 10 years) — having groomed for a few people, cleaned a few carts and drunk a few cans of beer at the obligatory Event party. I had been grooming for Tina Hennel on her team cart, but after falling off a few times in Obstacles, it occurred to me that maybe this wasn’t my calling. Perhaps it was this that convinced me to try my hand at something else, so let’s have a go this scoring thing.

After a couple of false starts, I settled on Access database and Visual Basic to produce it for the common PC. Then it was time to digest the rule book. I struggled on this for quite a while and was about to throw it in, but fortunately found an English translation on every second page.

The next couple of months were spent writing the first cut. I thought I was ready for my very first event in late 1993 at Werribee with a very patient Pauline Thill to assist me. But on the day, one disaster after another struck as I found that the real world doesn’t always stick to the theory in the book.

After spending a lot of the time re-writing the code and fudging the database while un-processed scores piled up, we managed to overcome the problems and post the results early after the last competitor had finished. Michael Thill was pleased and gave me one of his ‘slap on the back’ thank-yous. However I was not feeling comfortable, and Mike’s smiling Zapata moustache only made me less secure, as I had to face one more hurdle. I had to know if the scores were correct otherwise I would have a lot of egg on my face!

I went home and carefully re-checked it all and to my surprise everything the system had calculated was spot-on - well some-one has to win the Lotto. Having got through the first test with some success, I then had to plug all the holes in the system — it had more leaks than the Titanic.

Soon afterwards I was asked to score at the 1994 Victorian tiles at Cobram - my first big test. I was able to manually control the problems by this stage and was confident about it’s accuracy.

Gradually over the next couple of years I refined the system with field testing — in other words problems were fixed as they occurred during an Event.

My next big test was to score at the 1996 Australian Championships at Werribee. This event had over 90 entries — the biggest ever! As with all good computer geeks, you have to experiment to learn (and stuff up in the process). The night before the event is often spent making the changes I promised I was going to do months earlier. While trying to improve the program I somehow managed to stop it working completely! With the major annual Event on the calendar about to start within 12 hours, my barbed wire canoe was starting to take water. Fortunately by sometime in the wee hours I had it all fixed and ready to go later that day after a couple hours of sleep. All went OK for the week-end, other than the usual tweaks and on-the-spot bug-fixing.

The development of the system has been very much part-time and in fits and starts. I first demonstrated it publicly at the CDE School at Dookie College in mid 1996. I handed out disks of the system as it stood at that time to interested attendees. I received a bit of feed-back which indicated that more work was required (in other words it still fell over more times than a drunk Irishmen on St. Pat’s Day).

Back to the drawing board for more tuning, and more Events for more Field Testing. By now I was getting many requests from organisers of Events to use the system, but was reluctant as I was yet to be satisfied about it’s quality. In late 1996 Bega held the NSW Champs and wanted to use the system. I agreed, but with the condition that I came along as insurance. The insurance policy paid off as another bug emerged on the last day, and after a few anxious moments we resolved the problem posting results a little later than expected.

In the last few years a few individuals including John Fischer and Andrew Nankivell were brave enough to have a go at it by themselves at events in New South Wales and Victoria. Things generally went well for them, as finally the system was stabilising and some runs were now on the board.

The system has had a lot of field testing, including many Victorian, 2 NSW, and 2 Australian Championships, and numerous CDE’s of various levels in Victoria. It has now been developed to the point where I feel comfortable in letting it loose to the wider community. I thank those who have tested the earlier versions and appreciate the feed-back provided to me.

Update September 1999.
After a lot of feedback, the program has been fine-tuned over the last year.  The program has now been upgraded to handle FEI events with an interim release (version 1.4a).

Update January 2000
Version 1.5a released.  Major improvement is that it is becomes networkable, as well as numerous other tweaks performed.

Footnote: An earlier computerised scoring system was developed by Ian Jardine of Queensland in the 80’s using the DOS based tools of the day. Acknowledgment should go to him for his early work and demonstration that Carriage Driving is a sport that begs for something that can ease the pain of scoring when there is such a complicated set of rules. My system has been developed independently of his with a different toolset — I have been able to take advantage of Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) that were not available until the early 90’s. Some others have used Computer Spreadsheets to process and present result sheets.