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Topic: 2012 World Championship format (Read 15810 times) |
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99of9
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Re: 2012 World Championship format
« Reply #105 on: Nov 10th, 2011, 11:38pm » |
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Since the idea of the fee is to limit the size of the pool to only the most serious contenders, I for one will for the first time not be in this year's WC. Nevertheless, I wish you all well, and hope to watch/commentate some excellent games.
I hope this system will not continue in future years. Because it actively discourages participation, the player community is likely to take less ownership of the tournament. I think this is dangerous for Arimaa. I understand that the tournament got too big for Omar alone, but managing growth is a good problem, not a bad one, and in my opinion the solution is not to prevent it.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2012 World Championship format
« Reply #106 on: Nov 11th, 2011, 7:03pm » |
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Wow, ten people signed up! I definitely didn't expect so many. That gives me hope to be wrong on other counts as well. It's cute that we'll be able to talk about the $1000 prize pool.
I wonder if any more will sign up. I doubt it, since anyone who knew about the rules but was uncertain about participating would find it cheaper on average to sign up and withdraw later rather than waiting to sign up. But maybe someone who hasn't tuned in yet will come along later and decide that $100 or $120 isn't too much to pay.
Assuming (for the rest of the post) that the field stays at ten, there will be at least one and maybe two players who go three-and-out. I hope no one regrets participating for this reason. I assume everyone entered with their eyes open to the possibility.
Everything new brings something old to an end: I note that none of the three players to have played in every single Arimaa World Championship (99of9, Omar, and Naveed) will be playing this year, so from now on nobody will have that distinction.
The tournament will have 27, 28, or 29 wins divvying up $1001 in prize money, so each win will be worth $37.07, $35.75, or $34.52. In any case, three wins is a net gain and only two wins a net loss. The champ will have (approximately?) seven wins.
It will take about nine rounds (fewer on average?) to crown a champion, shorter than the eleven rounds it has taken each of the last four years, but longer than the seven rounds when we only did double-elimination. Is the shorter length an inducement to play for those who are otherwise squeezed for time? I guess one can reason that if one does poorly it doesn't take as much time, and if one is doing well, one doesn't care how long it is taking!
I would imagine that we could rustle up commentators for every single game if there are at most five games per week. Hopefully we can draw back many of the spectators who had a good time listening last year, and even set new audience records as we did last year. Indeed, we must set new audience records for the format to be any kind of objective success. If fewer people turn out to listen this year than last, I will consider my theory proved that the correct way to build the audience is to build the number of participants, as opposed to making the stakes higher.
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UruramTururam
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Re: 2012 World Championship format
« Reply #107 on: Nov 12th, 2011, 8:03am » |
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Well, ten people! That means that there will be a number of games played even when the entry fee is quite high. 
Meanwhile:
Something to think about for future years: I understand Omar's point of view to reduce the number of players in the main Championship to maintain high quality of the games. I even think that 10 players is too much, myself I would restrict the number of players to 8. But then in order to give everybody a chance a Qualification tournament should be set before the proper event. Not to duplicate it with the finals I would do as follows:
* The former year Champion has a slot in finals.
* Three top rated (HvH only!) players other than the former champion also get the slots in finals (the date of making the comparison should be announced in advance).
Those four players are not allowed to play in the Qualification tournament.
* The remaining four slots are for top four players of the Qualification Tournament.
Note that if any of eligible players (including the former Champion!) does not declare to play, the emptied slot is assigned to the fifth, sixth and so on finishers of the Qualification Tournament.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2012 World Championship format
« Reply #108 on: Nov 12th, 2011, 9:26am » |
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on Nov 12th, 2011, 8:03am, UruramTururam wrote:Something to think about for future years: I understand Omar's point of view to reduce the number of players in the main Championship to maintain high quality of the games. I even think that 10 players is too much, myself I would restrict the number of players to 8. But then in order to give everybody a chance a Qualification tournament should be set before the proper event. Not to duplicate it with the finals I would do as follows:
* The former year Champion has a slot in finals.
* Three top rated (HvH only!) players other than the former champion also get the slots in finals (the date of making the comparison should be announced in advance).
Those four players are not allowed to play in the Qualification tournament.
* The remaining four slots are for top four players of the Qualification Tournament.
Note that if any of eligible players (including the former Champion!) does not declare to play, the emptied slot is assigned to the fifth, sixth and so on finishers of the Qualification Tournament. |
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The floating triple elimination format scales very well, almost as rounds to lg(players). For example, if eight times as many players enter, the number of rounds goes up by just over three. In particular, if FTE with eight players takes about nine rounds, FTE with sixty-four players takes about twelve rounds.
This high efficiency raises the question of why there should be a separate qualifying tournament. If we exempt four of sixty-four and have a qualifying tournament to select the other four of sixty, the qualifying tournament would have to run four rounds just for single elimination, at least five rounds not to be sudden death, and six rounds to give all would-be qualifiers the same privilege of triple elimination that the main draw has. Adding just five rounds of qualifying to nine rounds of championship makes fourteen rounds total: a longer schedule than holding a unified tournament in the first place.
If we are trying minimize the work involved while keeping the whole format open to everyone, then we minimize the work by having a single, unified tournament. So what is the gain from having the extra work of a divided tournament? One "benefit" that I see is that the top four can become champion with fewer wins than in a unified tournament while everyone else needs more wins to become champion than in a unified tournament. But this benefit is equivocal in my mind; there is a fine line between letting top players skip games they are expected to win on the one hand and making the format unfair on the other hand.
Another possible benefit of a divided tournament would be to clearly demarcate what Omar is willing to do from what Omar is not willing to do. He would run the main event while someone else runs the qualifier. But would we really have to make extra total work just for this purpose? We could instead have a unified FTE tournament that has a volunteer TD for the first five rounds, with Omar taking over thereafter. That would create an clear limitation of Omar's responsibilities in a more efficient way.
One thing that I worry about, though, is that running a large tournament, no matter whether it is the beginning rounds of FTE, or a qualifier to select four slots for the main World Championship, or simply a just-for-fun tournament unrelated to the World Championship, will inevitably put pressure on Omar to be available to troubleshoot. Supposing, for example, that Omar were out of town and unreachable by phone for two months. Could the rest of us organize a big event during that time?
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ocmiente
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Re: 2012 World Championship format
« Reply #109 on: Nov 12th, 2011, 12:33pm » |
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A question about the pairing algorithm. According to the rules, the pairing algorithm attempts to:
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10. Minimize the number of pairings between players whose number of losses differ by N, etc.
11. Based on a ranking of the non-eliminated players primarily by least number of losses and secondarily by seed, maximize the sum of the squares of the differences in rank among paired players with equal number of losses minus the sum of the squares of the differences in rank among paired players with different number of losses.
...
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My interpretation of that is that the algorithm favors more closely matched games above giving the top seed more of an advantage in the tournament.
For round 2, for instance, the players with 1 loss would be paired with each other and the players with 0 losses would be paired together. This would favor better pairings from a spectator's point of view, but the players with 0 losses would have a better chance of continuing through the tournament if they were paired against the players with the loss. i.e. if rule 10 were reversed and rule 11 was more like simply maximizing the sum of the squares of the differences in rank..
for 2013, do we want to give the higher seeded players more of an advantage by pairing them with the weakest players until the field thins out, or do we want to favor a pairing system that tends to give more equal pairings?
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2012 World Championship format
« Reply #110 on: Nov 12th, 2011, 1:13pm » |
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on Nov 12th, 2011, 12:33pm, ocmiente wrote:| A question about the pairing algorithm. According to the rules, the pairing algorithm attempts to: |
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The rules probably do not match exactly what is done in the latest code. The solution is to have aaaa explain clearly what his pairing code does, and then make the rules equal to what he said.
Quote:| for 2013, do we want to give the higher seeded players more of an advantage by pairing them with the weakest players until the field thins out, or do we want to favor a pairing system that tends to give more equal pairings? |
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My bias is to limit the impact of seeding to make the tournament more fair. If the seeding has less impact, there will be less stress placed on the rating system due to less incentive to manipulate it. The downside of de-emphasizing seeding is that it becomes less likely that the best player in the world ends up as World Champion, but I'm willing to live with that disadvantage up to a point. It's not like chessandgo is having trouble winning enough titles to match his skill. 
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UruramTururam
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Re: 2012 World Championship format
« Reply #111 on: Nov 14th, 2011, 4:26am » |
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on Nov 12th, 2011, 9:26am, Fritzlein wrote:| This high efficiency raises the question of why there should be a separate qualifying tournament. |
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Well there are several pros for making sport events (including mind sports) as two-part ones with several players pre-qualified to the finals:
- The finals are well-defined short events with almost all the matches played on a high level. They are more media-oriented than large events. Look at the Olympic games...
- The luck is somewhat reduced. There are two factors there. First, quite-a-good player may be early paired with a few really strong guys and be defeated too early taking into account his actual strength. Second on longer run even champions may have worse days and lose a few games. Yet in fact both of these issues may be addressed by giving a few strong players byes for the early rounds.
- The finals and the qualifications may use different rules. For 8-players finals it may be triple or even quadruple elimination, or two groups by four with a top four group followed by a grand final. For qualification tournaments even double elimination is enough and the time for matches may also be shortened (e.g 1 minute per move).
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aaaa
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Re: 2012 World Championship format
« Reply #112 on: Nov 14th, 2011, 12:23pm » |
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I have a problem with the following rule:
Quote:| 1. Players are initially ranked based on WHRX ratings. A [player's] WHRX rating is their WHRE rating if it is based on at least 5 games, otherwise their WHR rating if it is based on at least 5 games, otherwise their gameroom rating. |
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This is wrong as these numbers can't directly be compared with each other. It would better if everyone who has an eligible WHRE rating is always ranked above anyone who doesn't and that the same goes with respect to eligible WHR ratings.
Probably not going to be an issue given the likely players, but still.
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UruramTururam
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Re: 2012 World Championship format
« Reply #113 on: Nov 26th, 2011, 3:19am » |
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By the way it seems that the 2012 championship will be the first with no new players in - every participant played in previous events.
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aaaa
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Re: 2012 World Championship format
« Reply #114 on: Nov 27th, 2011, 12:17pm » |
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ocmiente, the idea behind any tuple elimination tournament, floating or not, is to manifest strength differences by getting players into different loss brackets. That's why the preference should be to have as many games between players with the same number of losses as possible. Order of elimination can then be seen as roughly matching that of ascending performance, with the quality of remaining players and games reliably increasing. We want to minimize the chance of the seeding becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy as much as possible.
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| « Last Edit: Nov 27th, 2011, 12:18pm by aaaa » |
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froody
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Re: 2012 World Championship format
« Reply #115 on: Dec 16th, 2011, 3:11am » |
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You know; when I first saw that the entry fee was so high, I was shocked and appalled. Now it looks like it was actually a very smart move.
I consoled by telling myself that the community was awesome enough to pay for any kid to enter if they had a real chance of winning it, but couldn't afford to risk the money. I think maybe you should have put a note on the wc page saying something like: "don't worry if you can't afford it, the community will *probably* chip in to see you play, if you're an exciting player with a chance of causing an upset". But I guess any serious contenders knew this anyway. And maybe the only person in this position is hanzack. And he still might come up with the money himself. (I really hope so. If he doesn't win big on his forex, I may even chip in a bit of my own money to see him play. Anyone else tempted?).
I think it is a bit sad if *anyone* that would play cannot because of the money, but of course it was necessary. And I will only be super sad if the person missing out is able to worry the top 3 players.
but yeah, 2012 looks exciting, and I already look forward to a community run 2013 WC. Not sure which ideas I like best. Probably the separate qualifying tournament. I really just want to have as many high quality HvH games (with radio commentary and DEEP after game analysis) as possible.
I love Omar's goal to make it fun for spectators, but I also hate to see a player being forced to make a move they don't feel comfortable with just because of time pressure. I guess in the future the 5min max per move will be way too short? But for now it's OK.
I think we also need to make a sharp distinction between the different time settings. Arimaa at 30s per move is a _completely different_ type of game to Arimaa at 90s per move. Personally I look down on blitz players. I think they are impatient thrill seekers that are too lazy to study positions properly! There is also strong evidence that playing at blitz speed can make you *worse* at other speeds. I think it's very important to make kids aware of this.
I apply this theory to my table tennis coaching. If I have my way I make my kids practice boring repetitive drills and serve bucketfulls of balls all day. But of course that isn't fun. If you give me the wrong kid to coach they will end up hating me and quit playing (or just avoid me). If you give me the right kid to coach they will become a champion. But I say screw the kid that can't be bothered to train properly. If you're just there to have fun, you're wasting my time! In the long term I only have fun when I'm winning against the best (or one of my students is). Winning against a weak opponent will never be fun for me.
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| « Last Edit: Dec 16th, 2011, 3:32am by froody » |
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Tuks
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Re: 2012 World Championship format
« Reply #116 on: Jan 1st, 2012, 5:29pm » |
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Hanzack signed up so 11 players for the title!
So how is the format in the end? triple elimination?
and you are probably right froody, I like to think though that most of the skill of playing fast games (which i do all year) can be transferred over to long time controls with a couple of warm up games
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omar
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Re: 2012 World Championship format
« Reply #117 on: Jan 6th, 2012, 6:05pm » |
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on Jan 1st, 2012, 5:29pm, Tuks wrote:Hanzack signed up so 11 players for the title!
So how is the format in the end? triple elimination?
and you are probably right froody, I like to think though that most of the skill of playing fast games (which i do all year) can be transferred over to long time controls with a couple of warm up games |
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Yes, it's going to be floating triple elimination.
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