Arimaa Forum - Print Page


    
      
        Arimaa Forum
        (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi)
      

        Arimaa >> Events >> 2018 World Championship
        
(Message started by: mattj256 on Feb 12^th, 2018, 1:50pm)

Title: 2018 World Championship
Post by mattj256 on Feb 12^th, 2018, 1:50pm

Any plans for a 2018 WC?

Title: Re: 2018 World Championship
Post by omar on Feb 26^th, 2018, 5:21pm

Yes, I've been meaning to get it setup. Been really busy with another project. Starting to work on it now.

Title: Re: 2018 World Championship
Post by omar on Apr 2^nd, 2018, 4:36am

Registration is now open.

Title: Re: 2018 World Championship
Post by clyring on Apr 2^nd, 2018, 8:56am

Thanks again for getting the championship set up this year, Omar. Now that the tournament is officially announced, I'll bring up the concerns I raised in my message yesterday for public discussion.

Quote:

There was one sort-of issue from last year that I'd like to see resolved for this year, namely the bye distribution. In last year's tournament, with 17 players, we saw a bye given in every round before the final, including byes with three and five players left, and harvestsnow received two byes on consecutive rounds. It would have been much more equitable if 15 of the 17 players received a bye in the first round, so that the number of players in subsequent rounds would be a power of two and later byes would not be needed without a double forfeit or other strange happening. I think, if need be, pairing just the first round manually is a price worth paying toward that end.

A few other things:

*Per the current rules [Omar] cannot play in the event as its director, though there is a very reasonable chance the community would not object to [his] participation if this tournament rule is amended.
*In line with our discussion in the chatroom on October 23, the /logs directory on the server is not publicly accessible at present and if we are using a different monitoring service, the rules should reflect this.
*The WHR pages maintained by woh were relocated. See this forum thread: [link] (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=talk;action=display;num=1333742466;start=16#16)
*The rules paragraph on re-entering after a forfeit looks a little strange in a single-elimination tournament. (But of course the only harm done is making the already very long official rules about 1% longer.)

I'd also be happy to help out as a coordinator to the extent I can. In any case, I'm excited to see news about this year's championship and looking forward to playing.

With a currently scheduled start date of April 14, if these can be addressed, it will have to be sooner rather than later.

Also, the Denny's sponsorship is seriously awesome. I need to get some more practice in... :)

Title: Re: 2018 World Championship
Post by Tuks on Apr 13^th, 2018, 8:21am

I want to voice my concern about the fact that the current setup HIGHLY favours players who have high seedings.

The top seed gets the easiest run all the way to the final, no matter what happens. This continues down the line of seedings.

The bottom seed gets the hardest run all the way to the final, no matter who they eliminate.

The WHRE is based on event games only. There is only one event, so players with low seedings, as a result, will never be able to improve them unless they suddenly get better than the top 3 players (because they will always be put against them and eliminated).

Even new players won't remove them from the bottom of the seeding because theirs will be based on the more reasonable WHR ratings.

Basically, this tournament structure makes absolutely no sense. Can we please change it to a normal elimination bracket?

Title: Re: 2018 World Championship
Post by aaaa on Apr 13^th, 2018, 2:57pm

I agree that pairings should also depend on the strength of the past schedule in the tournament itself.

Title: Re: 2018 World Championship
Post by clyring on Apr 14^th, 2018, 3:28pm

Given how much noise there is in a single elimination tournament generally, I don't too much mind strongly favoring the higher seeds. I think the current system was designed to be set up and run with minimal effort without being terribly broken. I view it as sort of an interim championship, until we again have volunteers brave enough to run a more labor-intensive tournament.

The one event complaint is fair. Maybe I should announce a weekend Swiss-style event now, while there is fire in the gameroom from the championship. :) As it turns out, the currently posted pairings (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/wc/2018/showGames.cgi) for round 1 appear to have been seeded by gameroom rating- it seems that the scripts in the tournament management tool to fetch WHR seeds aren't currently functional. I'm not entirely sure this is a bad thing, as there aren't many rated events, especially since 2015, and the event ratings are much lower than gameroom ratings, so that mixing the two would produce some odd seeds, especially for Zkid, whose 1989 GMR would be between my own 1999.4 WHRE and risteall's 1972.0 WHRE, and a relatively quick glance at the recent games of the participants doesn't suggest ratings abuse.

Title: Re: 2018 World Championship
Post by omar on May 6^th, 2018, 11:05pm

rabbits, can you post here if you want to appeal the timeout out in the game againt Zkid. It doesn't seem like the server was under load or that the ping times were above the threshold. However, a game client bug may have been triggered. If you would like to appeal it, the game will be continued from the current position. You and Zkid will need to decide on a time to continue the game. The next round will be postponed by a week. I see that clyring had restarted the game unofficially and rabbits and Zkid have played the game from the timeout position before. Actually, clyring being a TD could have continued the game in an official capacity. It might have been better not to restart the game in an unofficial capacity. Anyways, let us know how you would like to proceed, rabbits.

Title: Re: 2018 World Championship
Post by rabbits on May 7^th, 2018, 5:40pm

While playing against Zkid yesterday, I used up all but 11 seconds of my reserve on move 38s, according to my client (which is set to the recommended JavaScript client). While playing 39s, my client told me I had lost when I still had 2 seconds of normal move time and 11 seconds of reserve time left.

(Also, sound did not work for me at all during the game. Perhaps I should have tried to debug this during the game. I could have tried using Chrome instead of Firefox, for example. Instead I decided it'd be better to focus on the game itself.)

Zkid had made the position tough for me, which is why I was using my reserve. I was considering making the move 39s hb1e hc1e hd1e cd8s. But I was aware of the issue that the camel could come freeze the rank 1 horse, and I was looking for alternatives. I didn't find the right move (pulling the gold cat south instead of stepping my own cat) in 1 minute and 58 seconds, and so it'd be optimistic of me to claim that I would have found it in the next 13 seconds. The position was difficult, but it still had life.

Earlier in the game, I should not have allowed my camel to be framed. And I regret taking the second rabbit. Arimaa is largely a game of patience, and even after seeing the path for the camel, I still chose that rushed move. Upon further inspection, I'm sure we could find more sub-optimal moves on both sides.. Arimaa is a deep and beautiful game :)

This is not the first WC loss that I've experienced which was largely due to connection/client issues. I lost my internet connection in a library during game 257354 (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/gameroom/comments.cgi?gid=257354). And this is far from the most egregious timeout loss. Harren had game 169677 (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/gameroom/comments.cgi?gid=169677), um, under control.

Apparently there is a bug in the client. (Does the server not send its reserve times for each player on each move. Perhaps that'd be easy to add?) And I think we all agree that the website could use an update. A few of us have tried. Hopefully someone will succeed someday soon.

I am not appealing the timeout. The timeout was unfortunate for me, perhaps even "unfair". But it'd be just as unfair to make Zkid try to survive another game against me :) :) haha. I'll try again next year.

I look forward to the final round of this tournament, and hope that it is free of technical mishaps. I feel very grateful for the Arimaa community. It's not perfect, but it is very good. Thank you to everybody who has made this game, this tournament, and this community possible.

Title: Re: 2018 World Championship
Post by omar on May 7^th, 2018, 6:53pm

Thanks for getting back on this rabbits. We will continue with the next round then.