This is the kind of rubbish that drives me nuts, and reinforces my inclination to ignore Q&As, which in any case are not authoritative and intended only as guidance for International Judges, of which, thankfully, I am not one.

Before looking into the details of this poorly thought-out and poorly written opinion, we should recognize that the Q&A panel is a fairly large group of IJs, only some of whom participate in an individual Q&A, and who may not carefully deliberate and formulate their answers (as anybody who reads this particular Q&A might suspect.) In theory, Q&As are reviewed each year and either erased or promoted into World Sailing Cases. In practice, I think, almost none of them are ever promoted, though that's tough to determine without a lot of googling.

Now for the meat of this Q&A: All corrections to scores are rounded, for three reasons: (1) the handicap itself is rounded (PHRF ratings, for example, are only calculated to the nearest 3 seconds per mile); (2) the finishing times are also rounded, commonly to the nearest second; and (3) the values reported out by whatever program the scorer is using to do the calculations are rounded (usually to 32 or 64 bits) and then displayed to a certain number of places. So the issue is not whether to round the corrected time, it's how to do so. The Q&A gives the right answer -- don't let the precision of the answer exceed its accuracy -- and then immediately goes on to say, don't round at all!

Suppose two corrected times are the same to the maximum number of places the scorer's program or calculator displays, and two boats end up tied. This Q&A seems to say that if a boat can find a calculator that reports another answer to a higher number of digits, she can ask for redress and win based on the idea that the race committee acted improperly by using that particular program or calculator instead of the one owned by the boat!

Many events use YachtScoring.com to calculate and publish results. Both raw times and corrected times are given to the nearest second in YachtScoring.com. What this Q&A says, in effect, is that it is an improper action on the part of the race committee to use YachtScoring.com to calculate results, if they can find a computer (say, a Cray?) that calculates the score to a higher precision! Bah.

The Q & A seems to be saying that the use of any scoring program is "incorrect" (which presumably means an improper action of the race committee for the purposes of Rule 62) unless the notice of race or sailing instructions state that A3 is changed.

The paragraph - "Calculating a corrected time to any number of decimal places, implies a timing accuracy that does not exist. However, if no rule contains any provision for rounding a boat’s corrected time, rounding to any unit of time is incorrect." - must be (to put it diplomatically) one of the more interesting to have ever come out of World Sailing.

Rob, you make some interesting comments about the World Sailing Q & As. In the past years, a lot of the Q & As have seemed to me to be very insightful, but since the 2017-2020 Rules came into force, they do not appear to have been so well thought out. One only needs to look at the Q & As last year that were published and later withdrawn for "further consideration". I have a lot of respect for many members of the Q & A panel, but I know they are very busy people.

The New Zealand Maori, who are the indigenous people over here, have a saying - "tough food needs to be well chewed, and not only food of the body". Maybe the Q & A panel need to chew their food a bit more to avoid indigestion.