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Topic: 2010 Postal Mixer (Read 12991 times) |
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RonWeasley
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Harry's friend (Arimaa player #441)
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Re: 2010 Postal Mixer
« Reply #30 on: Apr 12th, 2010, 5:48am » |
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Expect this week to go slowly since the owls are busy sending tax returns.
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Isaac Grosof
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Re: 2010 Postal Mixer
« Reply #31 on: Apr 12th, 2010, 3:59pm » |
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I am playing all twenty games, in order to gain experience. Will that cause too many mismatches, or is it okay?
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Sorry about that one thing.
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omar
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Re: 2010 Postal Mixer
« Reply #32 on: Apr 12th, 2010, 4:53pm » |
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I was contemplating using WHR ratings, but a number of players did not have any WHR rating.
Karl, I'm showing 147 total games.
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omar
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Re: 2010 Postal Mixer
« Reply #33 on: Apr 12th, 2010, 5:02pm » |
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on Apr 12th, 2010, 3:59pm, 722caasi wrote:| I am playing all twenty games, in order to gain experience. Will that cause too many mismatches, or is it okay? |
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I guess it depends on how much of a rating difference you consider a mismatch. If you consider 400 points as the cutoff then only your games with Tuks and Adanac would be considered a mismatch. However, it will be good experience trying to do the best you can against such strong players. Also the more players that are signed up, the less chances of a mismatch.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2010 Postal Mixer
« Reply #34 on: Apr 12th, 2010, 8:43pm » |
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on Apr 12th, 2010, 4:53pm, omar wrote:| Karl, I'm showing 147 total games. |
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I also count 147 games on a second try, with 23 mismatches. I wonder how I counted wrong the first time.
Quote:| I was contemplating using WHR ratings, but a number of players did not have any WHR rating. |
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Sure, we had that problem already last year because OpFor had no WHR. We just substituted the game room rating for OpFor. This year I was assuming you would do the same for OpFor, clueless, and any new players with no WHR.
Not using WHR seems weird after you put so much emphasis on it and also said you were no longer particularly concerned about distortions in the game room ratings because we were going to rely on WHR for seeding all events. If the game room ratings are less accurate, as we suppose, then using them will create more true mismatches even though the number of nominal mismatches will be the same.
But anyway, what's done is done. It will be interesting to see whether people with game room ratings higher than their WHR (e.g. Hippo, Eltripas) under-perform their expected scores due to having gotten harder pairings, while people with WHR higher than their game room ratings (e.g. ChrisB, camelback) out-perform their expected scores due to getting easier pairings. Indeed, if we don't observe this phenomenon, then it will indicate that it didn't really matter which ratings you used for pairing.
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| « Last Edit: Apr 12th, 2010, 8:55pm by Fritzlein » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2010 Postal Mixer
« Reply #35 on: Apr 12th, 2010, 8:49pm » |
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on Apr 12th, 2010, 3:59pm, 722caasi wrote:| I am playing all twenty games, in order to gain experience. Will that cause too many mismatches, or is it okay? |
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Oh, no, don't worry about causing mismatches. Game-hungry players like you will all end up playing each other, because you keep getting paired after everyone else has filled up their game quota against near opponents. Anyone who asks for more than ten games has to know and accept that they will play mismatches, so it is no problem.
I am only worried about people who request ten or fewer games and have to play mismatches anyway. Ideally there would be only a few "involuntary" mismatched games.
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| « Last Edit: Apr 12th, 2010, 8:50pm by Fritzlein » |
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Isaac Grosof
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Re: 2010 Postal Mixer
« Reply #36 on: Apr 13th, 2010, 8:15pm » |
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on Apr 12th, 2010, 5:02pm, omar wrote:
I guess it depends on how much of a rating difference you consider a mismatch. If you consider 400 points as the cutoff then only your games with Tuks and Adanac would be considered a mismatch. However, it will be good experience trying to do the best you can against such strong players. Also the more players that are signed up, the less chances of a mismatch.
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You must have missed my game against Fritzlein, but I will definitely try my best.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2010 Postal Mixer
« Reply #37 on: Apr 18th, 2010, 5:39am » |
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Almost exactly a week into the tournament, the last player to start (Strategos) made a move in all his games, and the fastest-moving game (Sconibulus vs. Heyckie) finished in 37 moves. Congratulations, Heyckie, on the early tournament lead!
The average game is on move 7, although that statistic will no longer make sense now that games have started to finish. Since both players are making one move per day on average, that means we are collectively moving twice as fast as the increment of one move per day per player.
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omar
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Re: 2010 Postal Mixer
« Reply #38 on: Apr 19th, 2010, 9:10am » |
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on Apr 12th, 2010, 8:43pm, Fritzlein wrote:
Sure, we had that problem already last year because OpFor had no WHR. We just substituted the game room rating for OpFor. This year I was assuming you would do the same for OpFor, clueless, and any new players with no WHR. |
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Good idea. I forgot we did this. I've made a note to do this next year.
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Janzert
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Re: 2010 Postal Mixer
« Reply #39 on: May 3rd, 2010, 10:38am » |
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For future reference, this morning (May, 3rd) at 4am EST was the first time OpFor did not have a move to think about in this year's postal mixer.
This seems like the earliest this has happened in a postal tournament but I can't really remember the dates from previous tournaments for sure.
Janzert
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2010 Postal Mixer
« Reply #40 on: May 3rd, 2010, 11:16am » |
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on May 3rd, 2010, 10:38am, Janzert wrote:For future reference, this morning (May, 3rd) at 4am EST was the first time OpFor did not have a move to think about in this year's postal mixer.
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So will you increase the thinking time, let the server idle, or use the server for other things? It seems OpFor has more than its original reserve time in every game.
And by the way, congratulations on OpFor's 2-1 start this year.
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Janzert
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Re: 2010 Postal Mixer
« Reply #41 on: May 3rd, 2010, 12:06pm » |
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The thinking time will stay the same for the whole tournament. What other uses I'll put the freed up cpu time to I haven't completely decided yet, there are some tests I've been wanting to run for a bit (both related and completely unrelated to arimaa). For now I'll probably just let the poor server cool off a little. 
Janzert
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2010 Postal Mixer
« Reply #42 on: May 3rd, 2010, 3:27pm » |
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I compiled the statistics to confirm what I thought was the case: openings have gone berserk this year.
For the first year ever, unbalanced setups are the plurality, indeed nearly the majority. Of the setups that are balanced, most of them are not symmetrical.
Flank elephants, which were extinct for two years, have crept back on the scene, mostly for Silver. Elephants behind a trap have also increased their share from last year, and are being used by both Gold and Silver. The only year on record with fewer centralized elephants was 2006.
Having two rabbits forward on the wings narrowly retains a majority, but dips to its lowest popularity ever. No single alternative is taking up all the slack; rather folks are being very experimental about the placement of their forward rabbits, with the most variation in any tournament to date.
Opening moves, as well, are more dispersed than ever. The most common pattern, namely moving the elephant forward three steps and one other piece forward one step, claims only one-third mindshare, the lowest winning share ever.
At one point I thought my categories were becoming obsolete, i.e. not narrow enough to capture the experimentation that was actually going on. This year the experimentation is so great that even my broad categories show that we are all over the map. If we used a more granular measure, perhaps we would find that this is the first year that no two games were alike after both players set up their pieces.
Many people expect that the reason Arimaa has no opening theory is that we haven't studied it much yet. What a surprise, then, that openings are now less standardized than they were in 2005 when I first started keeping track.
Elephant File 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
------------- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
d . . . 98.1 79.5 85.3 89.9 90.0 81.6
c . . . . 13.7 9.4 9.5 10.0 13.2
b . . . 1.9 6.3 5.3 . . 5.2
a . . . . 0.5 . 0.6
Rabbits Forward 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
--------------- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
ah . . 55.6 56.3 76.5 59.5 57.1 52.4
a . . . 2.5 15.3 4.1 0.6 5.0 12.8
none . . 14.4 22.6 10.0 6.0 2.1 10.8
cf . . 23.1 . . 8.3 1.4 6.6
ac . . . . . 0.6 . 5.2
c . . . 3.1 . . . . 3.8
acfh . . 0.6 . . 14.9 22.1 3.5
af . . . . . . 0.7 2.1
ach . . . . . . 1.4 1.0
acf . . . . . . . 1.0
ad . . . . . . . 0.3
ce . . . . . . . 0.3
adh . . . 2.6 4.1 10.1 10.0
adeh . . . 2.6 4.1
ag . . . 0.5 1.2
abgh . . 0.6
Setup Balance 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
------------- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
Symmetrical . 56.9 50.5 54.1 50.0 35.7 20.1
Balanced . 22.5 30.0 34.1 42.3 42.9 31.2
Unbalanced . 20.6 19.5 11.8 7.7 20.7 48.6
Gold Move 2w 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
------------ ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
E up 4 . . 68.8 26.3 25.9 13.1 20.0 22.9
E up 3 over 1 11.3 11.6 1.2 3.6 14.3 9.7
E up 3; X up 1 6.3 41.1 40.0 45.2 45.7 33.3
E up 2; X,Y up 1 3.8 10.5 23.5 27.4 17.1 21.5
E, X, Y, Z up 1 3.8 3.2 . 1.2 . 4.2
Other . . 6.3 7.4 9.4 9.5 2.8 8.3
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| « Last Edit: May 4th, 2010, 10:28am by Fritzlein » |
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megajester
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Re: 2010 Postal Mixer
« Reply #43 on: May 4th, 2010, 7:39am » |
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Wow. That's some great analysis.
Just a thought: Is it possible this is happening because of the influx of new and inexperienced players? What if you only analyse the games played by players rated above, say, 1800? Do you get the same result?
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2010 Postal Mixer
« Reply #44 on: May 4th, 2010, 10:21am » |
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on May 4th, 2010, 7:39am, megajester wrote:| Just a thought: Is it possible this is happening because of the influx of new and inexperienced players? What if you only analyse the games played by players rated above, say, 1800? Do you get the same result? |
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My impression from scanning the games was that in some ways the dispersion of openings is due to inexperience, but in other ways the newcomers were actually more conservative than the old hands.
For example, the move 2g of four pieces forward one step each wasn't played by any experienced players, which could explain why that opening was gone last year and back this year. On the other hand, newcomers were more likely to choose symmetrical setups, whereas experienced players were more likely to use unbalanced setups. The unusual placement of rabbits seemed to come more from experienced players, especially the record 1/6 of all setups with exactly one forward rabbit. Decentralized elephants were more common regardless of experience.
You might look at the "dumb" forward rabbit in the center in the choices "ad" and "ce", which each occurred for the first time this year, and conclude that those setups, at least, must be the work of ignorant noobs, but you would be wrong. One of them was the choice of an ignorant expert, namely me! 
The stats would look different if we filtered for experience, but I think they would still reflect the recent fragmentation of opening theory.
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