grande verse / play / the ranker
the rankerbuild your ariana grande top 20
two songs at a time, and you say which one is better. about sixty of those and every one of the 20 is correctly placed against every other one — including the pairs you were never shown, because your other answers already settled them.
shuffling the pool…
this is a merge sort with you as the comparator, which is the only reason sixty questions can order 20 songs — a scoreboard of random pairings would need hundreds and still get it wrong, because two songs can only be ranked against each other if they happened to meet. the pool is the 20 signature songs rather than all 75: an opinion about two album cuts you have never heard is a coin flip, and this sort propagates it. answers are not checked for consistency, so if you say a beats b, b beats c and c beats a, you get one of the several orders that admits. an unfinished run is kept in this browser so you can come back to it; the finished top twenty follows you between devices if you sign in. the sleeves are hotlinked from apple beside a link to the song.
how to play the ranker
- two songs at a time — pick the one you prefer.
- about sixty of those and you have your personal top twenty.
- there is no scoring and no wrong answer; you are the comparator, not a contestant.
- you can undo a comparison if you misclick, and the result is shareable when you finish.
what it actually is
the thing that separates this from every other ranking quiz is that it is an actual sort. the comparisons are chosen by a merge sort with you standing in for the comparison function, which means every pairing it shows you is one it genuinely needs the answer to, and the final order is mathematically consistent with every choice you made.
the usual approach — show people a grid and ask them to drag things around — produces an order dominated by whatever happened to be near the top of the list. sixty comparisons sounds like more work than it is, and it is the difference between a ranking and a rough impression.
tips
- answer quickly and instinctively. deliberating over each pair produces a list that reflects your reasoning rather than your taste.
- the number of comparisons varies between about fifty and seventy depending on how your answers fall — there is no way to shorten it by answering in a particular pattern.
questions
how many comparisons does the ranker take?
between about fifty and seventy, averaging around sixty. the exact number depends on your answers, because a merge sort asks fewer questions when your preferences are internally consistent.
why not just drag songs into order?
because a drag-and-drop list is dominated by the order things started in. pairwise comparison sorted properly produces a ranking that is consistent with every choice you actually made.
which songs are in the ranker?
the signature tracks from the catalogue — the singles and the fan-canonical album cuts, rather than all two hundred recordings, which would take several hundred comparisons.
is it free?
yes, entirely. no account, no sign-up, no install and no payment. nothing is collected — scores and streaks live in your own browser and go no further.
does it work on a phone?
yes. every game here is built for a phone first, and the ones that use audio work over a normal mobile connection because the clips are short official previews rather than files being downloaded.