https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qvnnkw/who-is-the-best-mario-kart-character

I had a lot of arguments over Mario Kart when I was a kid. Sometimes they were settled by race-offs (best of three, naturally), sometimes they were settled by fists and thrown controllers—but not once were they ever settled by math. But now, thanks to a data scientist's extensive dissection, feuding Mario Kart combatants have a better way forward. Writing for Civis Analytics, data scientist Henry Hinnefeld dove into the math to analyze the trade-offs for every character in Mario Kart 8 depending on choice of kart and tires.

The result is a fascinating graph and a concept that I was unfamiliar with: Pareto efficiency, and the accompanying Pareto frontier. Each character in Mario Kart has essentially the same stats, they're just allocated differently. Do you want a small character with zippy acceleration, or do you want a big character with a higher top speed? Turns out, data scientists actually have had an answer for this question since Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian engineer, sorted it out in the early 1900s.