It's every possible scheme which assigns a number of points for each medal. The set of all such schemes is covered by just two free parameters, for example the silver:gold ratio and the bronze:silver ratio, which are what I'm using here. Additionally assuming better medals are better, each axis goes from [1, infinity) but since medal counts are bounded, it doesn't need to be infinity in practice. The scaling is 1/x so being 1/10 from the infinity point is a 10x ratio. You could probably come up with other schemes like some weighted sum of log functions of the medal counts but I haven't seen those in practice. This is inspired by (and is essentially a 3D version of) this NYT interactive [1].
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 11.6 ms ] thread[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/29/upshot/olympi...