Jordan Ellenberg on the mathematics of Olympic scoring, particularly the new gymnastics scoring system that has replaced the “perfect 10.”

Gymnastics… isn’t constrained by simple applications of Newtonian mechanics. Gymnasts can perform moves that no one’s carried out before—that no one ever thought of carrying out before. Now, the sport has a scoring system that’s built to reward that. In theory, yes, there’s still an upper limit. There are only so many different possible elements in a routine and only so many possible connections between them, and each one, at least for now, is worth at most 0.7 points. But this new upper boundary is less like a perfect SAT score than a 1.000 batting average: a limit so far out of reach it might as well be no limit at all.