Link to the article

Summary

The article seeks to determine who the best Mario Kart character is through empirical data analysis. As defined by the author, as there is no definitive “best” configuration of character, kart, and tires, the descriptor of “best” can be broadly applied to a class of configurations that he describes as “Pareto optimal.” Using speed and acceleration as the two primary important aspects of karts, he labels a configuration Pareto optimal if there is no alternative to that configuration that will provide an increased speed or acceleration without decreasing the other. After testing 149,760 configurations, the following graph was achieved:

knitr::include_graphics("https://miro.medium.com/max/553/0*Z7Pq2tX3u0BeZAsv")

In short, 15 of these so-called “Pareto optimal” configurations were found, and he labels these as the “best.”

Notable Observations

Heavy vs. Light

Heavy characters are more versatile than light characters. While Wario’s possible configurations can achieve about 77% of the max acceleration, Baby Mario can only get up to 50% of the max speed.

Worst Characters

Metal Mario / Pink Gold Peach are the only characters that have no configurations on the Pareto frontier.

Worst Kart

The Badwagon really is bad. Nearly every configuration on the ‘anti-Pareto frontier’ (i.e. the worst possible combinations) involves karts from the Badwagon class.

Conclusion

#primary takeaways
heavy_better_than_light = TRUE
characters_to_avoid = list("metal mario", "pink gold peach")
kart_to_avoid = "badwagon"

Author Information

The article itself is a Medium submission by Henry Hinnefeld, whose LinkedIn profile describes himself as “Lead Data Scientist” at Civis Analytics.

link =  "https://www.linkedin.com/in/henryhinnefeld"

My Opinion

The article was for the most part an interesting read, with a variety of colorful visual aids that allowed for enhanced clarity and comprehension. However, I do have a slight objection to one of the underlying premises of his analysis: in plotting “performance” outcomes on an axis of simply acceleration vs. speed, it both assumes that acceleration and speed are equally important in a 1:1 ratio and ignores other factors. Granted, characteristics like “handling” are more nebulous and difficult to quantify, but the entire topic of “best Mario Kart character” is inherently nebulous, but this does not call for unnecessary simplification.

final_rating = 4/5