I'm no mathematician, but let's see if I can come up with a ballpark number of possibilities. The Christian category has 420 songs. So if each song gets matched up with another, that's 419 match-ups per song. So, 420 songs multiplied by 419 matchups equals 175,980 different combinations. Maybe I'm wrong about that logic, so to be safe, let's cut the number in half: 87,990.

Each person who judges goes through that entire list of match-ups in random order, but no match-ups get repeated. Seems entirely possible that even after three hundred rounds, you might not see your own song yet. Meanwhile, other people may have seen it several times already...they don't see the match-ups in the same order.

I have to say that there is usually some pretty darned good competition left standing in each category by the time they hit the semi-finals.


http://www.soundclick.com/MarkKaufman