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Adanac
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #180 on: Oct 19th, 2012, 12:17pm »
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"Tournament Director: Fritz Juhnke (Fritzlein)
 
....
 
The Tournament Director (TD) will arbitrate disputes and make the final decision about everything that is not clear from the rules. All players agree to accept the decisions of the TD. The TD may not be a player.

 
Are you not participating this year Fritz? I really hope you will because I can't imagine the WC without you!
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #181 on: Oct 19th, 2012, 1:17pm »
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on Oct 18th, 2012, 9:41pm, browni3141 wrote:
Accommodating the spectators at the players' expense is just wrong (IMO), which is why I said before that I don't think it's a relevant aspect of the discussion.

I completely disagree; spectators are definitely relevant.  I am tempted to rebut you on this point as well as continuing the discussion of how minimally a per-move time limit impinges on optimal time management.   You and I, however,  don't have much say in the matter.  Omar wants to promote Arimaa as a spectator sport.  He believes that spectators matter, and the per-move time limits are a mandate from the top for the benefit of spectators.
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #182 on: Oct 19th, 2012, 1:59pm »
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on Oct 18th, 2012, 4:55am, Fritzlein wrote:
Well, maybe we do need a further discussion of this change so that folks aren't surprised by it.  After all it hasn't been hashed out in this thread.  I'll make a separate post about it.

OK, here's the change to FTE from last year, and why it seems to make sense.   In 2012 the last optimization was:
"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."
In 2013 the last optimization will be (unless we decide not to do it):
"Maximize the sum of the squares of the rank differences between paired players. "
 
Either way we are trying to get folding pairing within a loss group.  The difference is what to do when people with a different number of losses have to play.  For example, what if only five undefeated players remain, and we need to pair one of them against one of the thirteen remaining one-loss players?
 
According to Swiss pairing, the ideal is sliding pairing within each group, and the bottom undefeated player plays the top one-loss player, i.e.:
1 vs 3
2 vs 4
5 vs 6
7 vs 13
8 vs 14
9 vs 15
10 vs 16
11 vs 17
12 vs 18
 
In 2012 we wanted folding pairing within each group, but tried also to keep the bottom undefeated player against the top one-loss player, i.e.:
1 vs 4
2 vs 3
5 vs 6
7 vs 18
8 vs 17
9 vs 16
10 vs 15
11 vs 14
12 vs 13
 
If we make the change for 2013, it will be folding pairing within each group, but now the top undefeated player against the bottom one-loss player, i.e.:
1 vs 18
2 vs 5
3 vs 4
6 vs 17
7 vs 16
8 vs 15
9 vs 14
10 vs 13
11 vs 12
 
Actually, the proposed solution for 2013 was already in effect for 2006 and 2007.  In 2007, though, the rule had an undesirable side effect: the top seed (Fritzlein) had vastly easier pairings through the first four rounds than the second seed did.  I got a bye and I got to "play down" against the easiest remaining player, twice.  That was three major breaks for me in just four rounds.  It seemed we were giving too much advantage to the top seed.  So we changed it in subsequent years to have the Swiss notion of pairing the bottom undefeated player against the top one-loss player.
 
In more recent years, however, that cross-group pairing has started to look unfair to the top player in the lower group, especially because that person would often stay top in his group for several rounds, and therefore have to "play up" multiple times.  Several solutions were proposed, but reverting to the method of 2006-7 seemed by far the simplest.  In that system the top one-loss player gets the easiest pairing of any one-loss player, rather than the toughest.
 
Furthermore, aaaa's notion of replacing pre-tournament seeding with in-tournament performance rating will prevent the top seed from getting all the breaks.  Yes, the top seed will still get the first bye or the first chance to "play down", but these easy pairings will undermine his in-tournament performance rating in future rounds, meaning that he won't get easy pairings round after round.
 
In short, it seems we picked the wrong fix to the problem of 2007, one with unintended consequences.  Now that we have a different solution for the original problem, we can remove the wrong fix and its unintended consequences.
 
Comments are, as always, very welcome.
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #183 on: Oct 19th, 2012, 2:00pm »
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on Oct 19th, 2012, 12:17pm, Adanac wrote:
Are you not participating this year Fritz? I really hope you will because I can't imagine the WC without you!

Yes, I will not be playing this year.  It is kind of you to say you will miss me as a player, but I feel I have much more to give as an organizer.  Compared to last year, there may be fifty additional people who have a chance to play serious, fun, games that they wouldn't otherwise have had.  Furthermore, if we can orchestrate a large tournament in a way that isn't an overwhelming burden for the TD, that will open the door for other large tournaments in the future, so there could be positive ripple effects as well.  This thought is highly motivating to me, and I hope the thought also mobilizes massive volunteer participation in making things work out well.  2013 can be another leap forward on the road to popularizing Arimaa.
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #184 on: Oct 19th, 2012, 2:55pm »
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on Oct 19th, 2012, 2:00pm, Fritzlein wrote:

Yes, I will not be playing this year.  It is kind of you to say you will miss me as a player, but I feel I have much more to give as an organizer.  Compared to last year, there may be fifty additional people who have a chance to play serious, fun, games that they wouldn't otherwise have had.  Furthermore, if we can orchestrate a large tournament in a way that isn't an overwhelming burden for the TD, that will open the door for other large tournaments in the future, so there could be positive ripple effects as well.  This thought is highly motivating to me, and I hope the thought also mobilizes massive volunteer participation in making things work out well.  2013 can be another leap forward on the road to popularizing Arimaa.

That's disappointing. I was hoping we'd get to play, and if I were to become WC, it would mean more to me if I had the challenge of beating you on the way.
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #185 on: Oct 19th, 2012, 8:02pm »
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on Oct 19th, 2012, 2:55pm, browni3141 wrote:
That's disappointing. I was hoping we'd get to play, and if I were to become WC, it would mean more to me if I had the challenge of beating you on the way.

Thank you.  That's very flattering.
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #186 on: Nov 17th, 2012, 4:04am »
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When is the signup for this?  I'm used to having to sign up months in advance.  So have I missed it?
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #187 on: Nov 17th, 2012, 9:53am »
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on Nov 17th, 2012, 4:04am, 99of9 wrote:
When is the signup for this?  I'm used to having to sign up months in advance.  So have I missed it?

I set registration start December 1.  In past years, I never understood the purpose of registration starting two months or more before the event, although I did like the feeling of building momentum as more and more people signed up and we all could see the growing list.  When the registration period was so long, there would be a handful of early signups that would get me excited, then weeks and weeks of nobody signing up, which would deflate my enthusiasm, and then a rash of late signups.  The chasm in the middle seemed unnecessary to me, if not counterproductive; am I missing something?
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #188 on: Nov 17th, 2012, 12:31pm »
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I have updated the rules to be more specific about when a timed-out game can be restarted: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/mwiki/index.php/2013_World_Championship_Rules#T echnical_Problems
 
Right now I have only two criteria: load average and ping time.  Anyone can check load average here: http://arimaa.com/logs/ .  In the line "load average: 1.03, 1.23, 1.29", the first number is the relevant one, and if it goes over 4 (the number of server CPU's) it is grounds for a restart.
 
Ping times can be checked here: https://my.pingdom.com/reports/result#daterange=1day&check=682116 .  Log in with yangfuli@yahoo.com and "arimaarox".  If there were two pings over 750 milliseconds in the last five pings, it is grounds for a restart.
 
I would be content to go to war with only those two low-level restart criteria.  Of course, more things can go wrong than just load average and ping time.  For example, the Apache server could go down.  My instinct, however, is that we can't afford to have people on call around the clock for major issues, since Omar is the only one who can deal with them.  If we can't have people on call to deal with the issue 24/7, then restarting the game is not a viable option because it wouldn't fit in the originally scheduled time window.  Either both players would get a bye or, if too many games were affected, the tournament would be delayed a week so that all affected games could be rescheduled and replayed.
 
Also, there could be problems that are high-level but transient (i.e. not requiring Omar to fix).  Perhaps the load is low and pings are fast, but something about the gameroom has issues anyway, which means a restart would be appropriate.  I can't think of a way to address this that isn't worse than the problem, because it opens a huge can of worms if we ask Tournament Coordinators to just guess whether there was a server problem.  Any criteria must be concrete and independently verifiable.  Therefore, I'm willing to let this type of injustice happen on the theory that it won't happen too often.  If I am wrong and this tournament has major timeout issues that we figure out a cause for, and we can't figure out a way to fix that cause but we can figure out a way to monitor that cause, we can include that monitoring for 2014.
 
Comments and suggestions are, as always, most welcome.
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #189 on: Nov 17th, 2012, 12:53pm »
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on Apr 4th, 2012, 9:37am, Dolus wrote:
Just an interesting thought I had regarding the on-call business. Google Voice came to mind.  It would require some level of management, but as long as anybody who would ever be "on-call" doesn't mind entrusting their phone number to at least whoever would be in charge of the Google Voice account, then there will only need to be one public phone number for people to call should they need to. The Google Voice number.
 
The level of management that is involved would be removing/adding the forwarding phone numbers as appropriate when different people are on call. There can also be restrictions put on when the phone can't be called, to avoid unwanted calls outside of the "on-call" timeframe. Not sure if you can specify "whitelisted" call times, or if you can only "blacklist" call times. But it's certainly possible.

This sounds like a great idea, Dolus.  If I understand correctly, the Arimaa community can set up a single phone number, for free, and set it to re-direct to any other phone number depending on time of day.  That's not too much maintenance for me to do myself every week when I divvy up the on-call duties between myself and the Tournament Coordinators.
 
Calls within the US and Canada would be free; Calls from the US and Canada to Europe would be $0.10/minute, which is OK since they would be only one minute long, i.e. "You need to log in to Arimaa.com".  I'm not sure how calls from outside the US to the Google voice number would work, though.
 
Does anyone have any experience with Google Voice, and/or any other suggestions?  For me by far the best way to be paged is a voice call, but perhaps for some people getting a text message is just as good if not preferable?  Not that I know of any free, single-number texting service; I'm just brainstorming here.
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #190 on: Nov 22nd, 2012, 7:05am »
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Karl, thanks so much for the wonderful job you are doing with organizing this tournament. It takes a lot of effort to hash through the details and incorporate the suggestions and feedback into the final WC rules. I really appreciate your efforts and I'm sure the Arimaa community does too.
 
Also a big thanks to everyone who has participated in the open legislation process and helped to make the rules better. I especially want to thank aaaa for not only providing feedback and suggestions, but also developing the code to make the tournament pairing possible. Thanks aaaa, you're the Sathoshi Nakamoto of Arimaa Smiley
 
As we get closer to the start of the tournament I hope everyone is getting as excited about the WC and other events as I am. I look forward to playing in the WC and helping out as a tournament coordinator. I hope the members of the community will also show their enthusiasm by volunteering to help with things like updating the game wiki, providing commentary and the many other tasks that Karl has listed. Even if you won't have the time to volunteer, you can still help by making a contribution to the prize fund. Organizing a big tournament that is open to everyone is not going to be easy. But if everyone chips in I think we can make it a big success.
 
Here are the suggestions I have for the WC rules:
 
1. "Each round will be paired Monday 24:00:00 UTC, except in the unlikely event that a game from the previous round has not yet finished, in which case the next round will be paired directly after the end of the final game of the previous round." In the past when the last game of the round has ended, players have been anxious to have the next round paired as soon as possible. The sooner the round is paired the more time the players have to work out a new time if needed. There is the downside that someone who didn't update their preferred times for the next round might get scheduled for a bad time, but still they would have time to reschedule it. I would suggest considering something like "Each round will be paired shortly after the completion of the last game from the previous round. However, this will be no earlier than Saturday 1:00 UTC and no later than Tuesday 1:00 UTC."
 
2. "It is the responsibility of the player with the first move to start the game when both players are seated: if Silver is seated and Gold delays starting the game more than 15 minutes past the scheduled start and more than 3 minutes past the time Silver was seated, then Gold loses by forfeit." How about "It is the responsibility of the player with the first move to start the game promptly when both players are seated: the Gold player must start the game within 3 minutes after both players have been seated provided the Silver player has arrived within the grace period." Trying to avoid the situation where both players arrive at the scheduled start time and then the Gold player delays starting the game for almost 15 minutes.
 
3. I would highly encourage using the time controls that I would like us to standardize on.
   1m/4m/100/0/4h/4m
   1m30s/5m/100/0/6h/5m
   2m/6m/100/0/8h/6m
These time controls were chosen to be easy to understand and remember while still keeping the game moving at a steady pace and giving players some flexibility to think longer on some moves. I'm sure you already know this, but for those that don't: just the first parameter of the time control determines the rest of the parameters. If M is the time per move and all the time parameters are in minutes then the time control is:
M/2+2*M/100/0/240*M/2+2*M
 
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #191 on: Nov 22nd, 2012, 8:13am »
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on Nov 22nd, 2012, 7:05am, omar wrote:
Karl, thanks so much for the wonderful job you are doing with organizing this tournament. It takes a lot of effort to hash through the details and incorporate the suggestions and feedback into the final WC rules. I really appreciate your efforts and I'm sure the Arimaa community does too.

Thank you!  I hope the tournament will be one the community can be proud of.  I will be well rewarded for my efforts if (A) we have the biggest participation in an Arimaa tournament ever and (B) some of my new ideas work out well.  Of course not everything I try will work, but often one can't know in advance, and we have to be open to experimentation to find out.
 
Quote:
Also a big thanks to everyone who has participated in the open legislation process and helped to make the rules better. I especially want to thank aaaa for not only providing feedback and suggestions, but also developing the code to make the tournament pairing possible. Thanks aaaa, you're the Sathoshi Nakamoto of Arimaa Smiley

Amen to that!  Thanks for all the ideas and suggestions, and thanks for everyone who helps make the suggestions reality.  Aaaa, without you, all the theoretical discussion about optimal pairings wouldn't make any practical difference, because it simply can't happen unless it is automated.
 
Quote:
Here are the suggestions I have for the WC rules:

Thanks for the suggestions, Omar.  I appreciate the feedback and error-checking.
 
Quote:
3. I would highly encourage using the time controls that I would like us to standardize on.

On point of standard time controls, I will stand by my offer earlier in the thread.
 
Quote:
2. "It is the responsibility of the player with the first move to start the game when both players are seated: if Silver is seated and Gold delays starting the game more than 15 minutes past the scheduled start and more than 3 minutes past the time Silver was seated, then Gold loses by forfeit." How about "It is the responsibility of the player with the first move to start the game promptly when both players are seated: the Gold player must start the game within 3 minutes after both players have been seated provided the Silver player has arrived within the grace period." Trying to avoid the situation where both players arrive at the scheduled start time and then the Gold player delays starting the game for almost 15 minutes.

Good idea; it isn't fair to Silver to have to stand at attention for a long time.
 
I know it is too late for a technical change now, but for 2014 I would be happiest to have the clocks start automatically for tournament games, without the intervention of the players, and without the players even sitting down.  I don't know how difficult this would be technically, but it seems the fairest way to handle tardiness, and it avoids convoluted rules about who has to do what when.  To me it doesn't make sense that either player should have to wait for a tardy opponent.  If the other guy isn't there on time, his clock should be running down.
 
Quote:
1. "Each round will be paired Monday 24:00:00 UTC, except in the unlikely event that a game from the previous round has not yet finished, in which case the next round will be paired directly after the end of the final game of the previous round." In the past when the last game of the round has ended, players have been anxious to have the next round paired as soon as possible. The sooner the round is paired the more time the players have to work out a new time if needed.

In last year's tournament I felt quite inconvenienced by the variable pairing time, and I know by chat and forum comments that I was not the only one.  In addition, woh wrote me privately just last week to suggest that pairings be done at exactly the same time every week, without even the possibility of delay I have written in.
 
It is easy for a tournament organizer to tell everyone to get their preferences entered as soon as possible, but I preferred to wait until the last minute, not because I was lazy and irresponsible, but because I often didn't know my schedule ten days in advance.  The longer I waited to enter time preferences, the more accurately I knew my schedule for the following week.  But trying to wait for more information became a hassle when I had to figure out each week exactly how long I was allowed to wait.
 
It is true that scheduling earlier gives the players more time to re-negotiate a time, but the scheduling algorithm has already picked the optimal time.  I know players are sometimes unhappy with the time they get assigned, but that is a consequence of opponents having schedules that don't mesh.  The two players logically can't find a better time slot than the algorithm found unless...  (A) They didn't enter their true preferences.  (Why didn't they have their true preferences entered?  Because the scheduler ran sooner than they were ready? Tongue) or (B) Something in real life changed after they entered their preferences, so formerly good times became bad or vice versa.
 
If (B) is the main reason that people are able to re-negotiate a time that was better than the best time according to their entered preferences, then the smart thing to do is to run pairings as late as possible, rather than as early as possible.  If everyone knows when the deadline is, they can maximize the accuracy of their preferences, and minimize the likelihood of later changes that necessitate re-negotiating.
 
I chose Monday 24:00:00 UTC because it is highly likely that this time can be honored every week.  It doesn't conflict with anything in my schedule, so I will always be available, and it won't conflict with any games unless a game in the last time slot (119) goes much longer than average.
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #192 on: Nov 22nd, 2012, 10:47am »
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on Nov 22nd, 2012, 8:13am, Fritzlein wrote:
...have the clocks start automatically for tournament games, without the intervention of the players, and without the players even sitting down.

 
That would seem to resolve quite a bit of the complexity with no downside. Hopefully it can happen for next year.
 
on Nov 22nd, 2012, 7:05am, omar wrote:
players have been anxious to have the next round paired as soon as possible.

 
on Nov 22nd, 2012, 8:13am, Fritzlein wrote:
In last year's tournament I felt quite inconvenienced by the variable pairing time, and I know by chat and forum comments that I was not the only one...

 
It might be really nice, and I think help satisfy the competing desires, if the games could be paired, where the players in each game are set, as soon as possible after the previous round ended. Then scheduled, with each game receiving the time it will be played, at a fixed time later on.
 
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #193 on: Nov 23rd, 2012, 7:55am »
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on Nov 22nd, 2012, 10:47am, Janzert wrote:
It might be really nice, and I think help satisfy the competing desires, if the games could be paired, where the players in each game are set, as soon as possible after the previous round ended. Then scheduled, with each game receiving the time it will be played, at a fixed time later on.

Ah, I see.  I do remember that as a player I had a burning curiosity to know as soon as possible who my next opponent would be.  With that in mind, perhaps I can try to do the pairing earlier than the scheduling, as my own schedule permits.
 
I wonder whether, in a large tournament with many games every round, we might have a Monday game or two every week.  If so, then the discussion about pairing/scheduling earlier or later will be mostly moot.  We must in any case wait until all the games are complete; our window of choice when to do paring might be only a few hours rather than a day or two.  But in later rounds when only a few players remain, we know from experience that it is likely all games will finish on the weekend.  At that point it could make a real difference.
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Re: 2013 World Championship Format
« Reply #194 on: Nov 25th, 2012, 7:58am »
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On point of standard time controls, I will stand by my offer earlier in the thread.  

So we need one more vote to use the standard time controls? You mean my vote doesn't count for two Smiley
« Last Edit: Nov 25th, 2012, 7:59am by omar » IP Logged
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