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Topic: 2010 World Championship Rules (Read 8978 times) |
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aaaa
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Re: 2010 World Championship Rules
« Reply #15 on: Nov 9th, 2009, 12:22pm » |
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Why have a fixed number of finalists at all? If simply all those with, say, a positive win-loss score would advance to the finals, then at all times, if a player has any chance of making it past the Swiss stage, then that player would always be in control of his or her own fate and not be subject to the results of others and the intricacies of the tiebreaker system in use. The only real disadvantage of this I can think of are the byes there would be in case of an odd number of finalists.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2010 World Championship Rules
« Reply #16 on: Nov 9th, 2009, 9:03pm » |
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I would actually prefer not to have the division between the preliminaries and finals at all, but rather a unified floating triple (or quadruple?) elimination. Admittedly, we would either have to fix the seeding or make sure the top seed was not overly favored, but assuming that difficulty could be overcome, it would provide the most discrimination per length of tournament if all losses carried forward.
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The_Jeh
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Re: 2010 World Championship Rules
« Reply #17 on: Nov 10th, 2009, 1:53pm » |
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on Nov 9th, 2009, 9:03pm, Fritzlein wrote:| I would actually prefer not to have the division between the preliminaries and finals at all, but rather a unified floating triple (or quadruple?) elimination. Admittedly, we would either have to fix the seeding or make sure the top seed was not overly favored, but assuming that difficulty could be overcome, it would provide the most discrimination per length of tournament if all losses carried forward. |
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Far in the future, if Arimaa becomes very popular and physical games replace online games for the world championship, we will have to admit regional qualification tournaments, which will inevitably create partitions between different stages. Having a final tournament of a limited number of players now will preserve analogy between the championships we hold now and the ones that we hope to hold in years to come. I personally think an 8-player final could become a long-lasting tradition.
If you win out, you will be world champion, so no player can say that he didn't control his own destiny. The "controversy" created by having a limited number of players in a final tournament might not necessarily be a bad thing. It does, after all, give people something to talk about.
So while I understand the mathematical desire to make the tournament as discriminatory as possible, I wonder whether years from now we will be glad that we started having a final partition now.
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aaaa
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Re: 2010 World Championship Rules
« Reply #18 on: Nov 11th, 2009, 7:49am » |
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I thought the current division was considered to be a good thing in principle because it would ensure a reasonable minimal number of tournament games for any participant regardless of results. Also, unless and until there is some algorithm in place that runs in polynomial time with respect to the number of participants, a unified tournament would in these times already spell trouble. The 2008 Open Classic had 26 players. From the looks of it, scheduling such a number of players in one floating elimination tournament would already be murder on any non-sophisticated algorithm.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2010 World Championship Rules
« Reply #19 on: Nov 11th, 2009, 4:12pm » |
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on Nov 11th, 2009, 7:49am, aaaa wrote:| I thought the current division was considered to be a good thing in principle because it would ensure a reasonable minimal number of tournament games for any participant regardless of results. |
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It is a worthy goal to have a tournament that lets everyone play to the end, and furthermore have opponents of roughly equal strength. Such a tournament is more fun for more people. However, that goal is somewhat in conflict with the goal of determining a World Champion.
Breaking the World Championship into two parts meets both needs reasonably well. However, if in the future we have friendly Swiss tournaments all year long, plus the World League play, we will no longer have to overburden the World Championship with a secondary purpose. At that point we can discuss the best way to select a champion apart from providing a friendly tournament for all entrants.
Quote:| Also, unless and until there is some algorithm in place that runs in polynomial time with respect to the number of participants, a unified tournament would in these times already spell trouble. |
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Yes, we would definitely need a polynomial-time algorithm. Fortunately an N^4 pairing algorithm exists. We wouldn't have to stop using global pairing criteria, just implement the more efficient algorithm.
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omar
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Re: 2010 World Championship Rules
« Reply #20 on: Nov 12th, 2009, 7:18pm » |
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See the thread titled '2008 World Championship Format' for how we decided on the current WC format.
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=events;action=display; num=1249655379
I was in favor of using some sort of rating to limit the number of entries in the WC tournament to just 8, but others felt strongly that ratings should not be used at all, so we decided on having a swiss preliminary to determine the top 8. Perhaps in the future if we have more events going on throughout the year we might want to reconsider using just ratings to limit the entries in the WC. Ratings based on only event games would be more accurate since the players do not get to select their opponents and are trying their hardest to win in such games. Not having a preliminary would reduce the burden on the players in the WC and we might instead be able to use that time to make the WC a floating triple elimination format instead of floating double elimination. Also it would encourage players to participate in the events throughout the year to build their ratings.
Woh, if you get a chance could you run WHR using just the event games. It would be interesting to see what these ratings look like; also bots could be included in this since bots have played in some events like the postal mixer. If the 'event' field in the games archive is not set to 'casual game' then it is an event game, but exclude ones that begin with 'bad ', 'test ' or 'trial '.
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| « Last Edit: Nov 12th, 2009, 7:21pm by omar » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2010 World Championship Rules
« Reply #21 on: Nov 12th, 2009, 8:26pm » |
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on Nov 12th, 2009, 7:18pm, omar wrote:| Perhaps in the future if we have more events going on throughout the year we might want to reconsider using just ratings to limit the entries in the WC. |
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Why do we have to limit the number of entrants in the World Championship? Just because we don't have a polynomial time pairing algorithm coded?
One problem with having a World Championship be invitational based on ratings is that it gives people near the top of the rating list an incentive not to play games that will count in the rating system. Someone with a high rating that puts them in the elite (at least tempoarily) can only lose and not gain by playing more rated games.
I would prefer a unified open World Championship to the present division of qualifying and finals, but having an open feeder tournament for a limited finals is still much better than having a closed invitational finals based on ratings.
The World Championship of chess somehow managed to be open in many of its incarnations despite the millions of chess players all over the world. There were feeder tournaments (interzonals) with sub-feeder tournaments (zonals) in a giant pyramid filtering down to the climatic championship match. If we decide that the participation in the Arimaa World Championship must be limited (why? not enough space in the convention hall?), and we intend to limit it on the basis of year-round tournaments, then instead of computing ratings from those tournaments, we should have the qualifying tournaments directly qualify people, e.g. the top two finishers in each event qualify.
Tournaments in general are more robust to vigorous competition than ratings are. We shouldn't stress out the rating system by making it the qualifying benchmark if there is any tournament-based alternative.
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omar
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Re: 2010 World Championship Rules
« Reply #22 on: Nov 13th, 2009, 11:35am » |
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I modified the Swiss pairing program to use the tie break suggested by Karl. I am running into problems with some players not getting paired.
Here is the modified pairing program:
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/tourn/compare/sim/formats/swissJuhnke
Search for '2009.11.13' to find the line I changed.
Here is what's happening when I run it:
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/tourn/compare/sim/x1.txt
Search for 'no op' to find the line where no opponents were found.
Karl did I get your formula right?
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| « Last Edit: Nov 13th, 2009, 11:35am by omar » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2010 World Championship Rules
« Reply #23 on: Nov 13th, 2009, 4:11pm » |
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In the line Code:| pa[i]['score'] = sprintf("%03d%06d%08d%06d", val(pa[i]['wins']), tb1, pa[i]['r'], rand(999999)) |
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Shouldn't there be a loop to calculate the value of tb1? The number of tiebreaker points is a sum across all of the player's opponents so far. Maybe that value could be calculated after the loop
# Determine the number of losses our opponents have had
which formerly calculated the first tiebreak. Furthermore in the line Code:| tb1 = 100000.0/(1+10**(4*(val(pa[i]['wins'])-val(pa[i]['opwin']))/($rn+1))) |
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isn't pa[i]['opwin'] the total wins of all opponents? My formula needs to be applied to each opponent individually. It expressed the number of tiebreak points for a particular opponent, not for all opponents together.
Am I being clear at all?
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| « Last Edit: Nov 13th, 2009, 4:18pm by Fritzlein » |
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omar
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Re: 2010 World Championship Rules
« Reply #24 on: Nov 13th, 2009, 10:35pm » |
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Oh OK. Something like this then:
P = wins[this_player]
foreach op in list_of_opponents[this_player]
O = wins[op]
T = 1/(1+10^(4*(P-O)/(N+1))
TieBreaker += T
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2010 World Championship Rules
« Reply #25 on: Nov 14th, 2009, 5:51am » |
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Yeah.
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woh
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Re: 2010 World Championship Rules
« Reply #26 on: Nov 26th, 2009, 10:52am » |
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on Nov 12th, 2009, 7:18pm, omar wrote:Woh, if you get a chance could you run WHR using just the event games. It would be interesting to see what these ratings look like; also bots could be included in this since bots have played in some events like the postal mixer. If the 'event' field in the games archive is not set to 'casual game' then it is an event game, but exclude ones that begin with 'bad ', 'test ' or 'trial '.
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The WHR for events games is now available.
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| « Last Edit: Nov 26th, 2009, 10:52am by woh » |
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Nombril
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Re: 2010 World Championship Rules
« Reply #27 on: Nov 28th, 2009, 2:46pm » |
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(A bit off topic from the world championship rules...)
on Nov 26th, 2009, 10:52am, woh wrote:
I'm showing up on this list with 7 games, but I've only played in the 4 game swiss tourney in Nov. Did I miss changing a setting to "casual" games, or are the autopostal games considered tournament games? I'm not even sure where to look in my history to see the game classification.
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woh
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Re: 2010 World Championship Rules
« Reply #28 on: Nov 30th, 2009, 3:52am » |
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on Nov 28th, 2009, 2:46pm, Nombril wrote:(A bit off topic from the world championship rules...)
I'm showing up on this list with 7 games, but I've only played in the 4 game swiss tourney in Nov. Did I miss changing a setting to "casual" games, or are the autopostal games considered tournament games? I'm not even sure where to look in my history to see the game classification. |
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Yes, the auto postal games are included.
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Adanac
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Re: 2010 World Championship Rules
« Reply #29 on: Dec 31st, 2009, 8:06am » |
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We're up to 13 players in the World Championship. I know we can do better than that! Are there any last minute entrants out there? The WC is lots of fun and a great way to gain HvH experience. I'd highly recommend signing up, even if you're fairly new to Arimaa. You might even surprise yourself and qualify for the Top 8 Finals.
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