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Janzert
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2014 World Championship Rules
« on: Sep 2nd, 2013, 5:30pm » |
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Well it's September and time to really get active on the next WC planning. Here is the page for the 2014 WC rules. I've listed the main changes I'm currently considering or have made in sections at the top of the page. Most of these are simply procedural changes or additions. The rest I consider fairly minor changes to the actual format. I believe the overall format from last year worked quite well and that it's important for Arimaa to bring year to year stability to the WC format.
I would love to hear any feedback on these changes or any additional changes that I missed. I do not expect all the changes currently under consideration to make it in, especially all of the ones requiring software change.
I'm expecting to have all substantial changes finalized by November 1st. With any software changes required for them to be in progress and hopefully mostly complete by that time as well. I do not want to make any changes after December 1st when registration opens.
Janzert
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aaaa
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #1 on: Sep 5th, 2013, 8:03am » |
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I would like to get some feedback on this proposal.
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supersamu
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #2 on: Sep 5th, 2013, 10:38am » |
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I like the idea. It took a while before I understood it, but in the end the process is pretty simple.
I don´t think I understand it. You want the players with less than 3 losses to be virtually paired against the dummy player and be given wins against this dummy player?
This only players in the Swiss Section (the players with 3 or more losses) get "real" byes.
This then influences the UTPR and the STPR of the human player and the dummy Player.
Were the rating(s) of the human Players influenced by byes before or why do you think this method is better?
I understand the process, but I don´t understand how this process lessens the influence of byes gained.
Or do byes affect the pairings so heavily that it is favorable to give players a higher performance rating and not giving them byes?
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Hippo
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #3 on: Sep 5th, 2013, 11:07am » |
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on Sep 5th, 2013, 8:03am, aaaa wrote:
I have not studied the proposals deeply, but I would like to remember Boo's proposal .
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harvestsnow
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #4 on: Sep 5th, 2013, 12:05pm » |
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Quote:Seeding
Players will be seeded according to the WHRE ratings maintained by Hervé D'Hondt, as calculated 1/4/2013. Players with fewer than six WHRE games will be seeded according to their gameroom ratings, adjusted at the discretion of the Tournament Director to account for artificially inflated or deflated ratings, since gameroom ratings can be manipulated much more easily than WHRE ratings. Seeding has a large effect on early-round pairings, but rapidly decreases in importance; after about three rounds seeding becomes irrelevant as pairing is then done entirely on the basis of in-tournament results. |
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Which version of the WHRE will be used?
If it's the current version, there will be a seeding issue. woh tuned it so that ArimaascoreP1 would be rated 1000, anchoring it to the gameroom ratings. But since the Auto Postal games have been removed, ArimaascoreP1 isn't in the list anymore. A lot of low ranked players disappeared as well, resulting in a general deflation: WHRE ratings are now about 200 points lower than gameroom ratings. If we're going to use both, the WHRE needs to be rescaled.
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Janzert
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #5 on: Sep 5th, 2013, 10:40pm » |
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on Sep 5th, 2013, 8:03am, aaaa wrote:
I would like to see some comparison between that and simply dropping UTPR from use, or doing both together. By default I would rather simplify the pairing system. Adding complexity should only be done if it can be shown to correspondingly improve the tournament. Where the amount of improvement is probably mostly a subjective judgement.
Hopefully I'll get time to dig into it in the next couple of months.
Janzert
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Janzert
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #6 on: Sep 5th, 2013, 10:55pm » |
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on Sep 5th, 2013, 11:07am, Hippo wrote:
I have not studied the proposals deeply, but I would like to remember Boo's proposal . |
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Two things going against it unfortunately. First it's a fairly significant change and so I would want to see that it works significantly better than the current system before I would consider it. Second I still feel that it is rather ambiguously specified. While I could sit down and implement something that I think would fulfill the proposal, I'm not at all confident that it would be what was proposed. Actually I think I could probably sit and implement a half dozen different variations that would fit in the proposal.
I should probably also mention that if I don't get time to make any changes to the pairing system from last year, I won't be extremely disappointed. While there is certainly room for improvement I don't think it was terribly bad either. So I don't have much interest in tossing it completely or making major changes.
Janzert
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| « Last Edit: Sep 5th, 2013, 10:56pm by Janzert » |
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Janzert
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #7 on: Sep 5th, 2013, 11:26pm » |
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on Sep 5th, 2013, 12:05pm, harvestsnow wrote:
Which version of the WHRE will be used?
If it's the current version, there will be a seeding issue. woh tuned it so that ArimaascoreP1 would be rated 1000, anchoring it to the gameroom ratings. But since the Auto Postal games have been removed, ArimaascoreP1 isn't in the list anymore. A lot of low ranked players disappeared as well, resulting in a general deflation: WHRE ratings are now about 200 points lower than gameroom ratings. If we're going to use both, the WHRE needs to be rescaled. |
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WHRE is something that is bothering me for more reasons than just the skew from gameroom backup ratings. Of the top 20 players 11 have less than 50 games, and 5 less than 20. There are only ~200 players over ~2000 games ranked. It just doesn't seem to have enough players with enough games to give valid ratings for enough of the player base.
The solution of course is that we need more events.  But as a short term solution I'm not sure what would be best. I'm currently leaning toward asking that auto-postal games be re-added. Even though the auto-postal system seems to be broken for the last few months and is open to manipulation regardless it may be the lesser of the evils available.
Janzert
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Janzert
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #8 on: Sep 23rd, 2013, 1:42pm » |
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Given the state of WHRE and gameroom rankings what do you think of this? Drop WHRE and gameroom ratings altogether. Use a weighted average between WHRH and a dummy 1400 rating. Specifically seed = 1400 + (WHRH * # of games ) / # of games + 1.
From what I see now pros are:
Uses a rating that has broad player and game input.
Does not need a second rating system to fall back on.
Smoothly handles the case of a player with very few games in the system.
Cons:
The rating is manipulable since a player can choose the opponents for rated games. I would probably leave a clause in to adjust manipulated ratings.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #9 on: Sep 25th, 2013, 11:28pm » |
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on Sep 23rd, 2013, 1:42pm, Janzert wrote:| Specifically seed = 1400 + (WHRH * # of games ) / # of games + 1. |
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Did you leave off some parentheses there?
seed = (1400 + (WHRH * # of games )) / (# of games + 1)
I was applying the division before the first addition and getting something silly.  Anyway, I would rather use the WHRE because it is less subject to manipulation. It is problematic that many players will have no WHRE, given that substituting the gameroom rating makes it potentially more manipulable than even WHRH.
Here's an alternative proposal that is somewhere between "no WHRE = 1400", which leaves too many unseeded players, and "no WHRE = fairly scaled gameroom rating", which is too manipulable.
seed = (1400 + gameroom + (WHRE * # of games )) / (# of games + 2)
This mutes the effect of gameroom ratings, thereby providing no incentive to avoid getting a WHRE. Some joker who inflates his gameroom rating to 2600 still only gets seeded at 2000, which he very likely could have earned by playing in events. On the other hand, it does differentiate all the players with no WHRE.
That said, I'm sensitive to the fact that there have only been two events this year: the World Championship and the Postal Mixer. Such a paucity of events undermines the value of WHRE. Maybe until such time as we have more events year-round it would be just as well to use
seed = (1400 + gameroom + (WHRH * # of games )) / (# of games + 2)
I prefer this to your original proposal, because it differentiates players with no WHRH.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #10 on: Sep 26th, 2013, 12:44am » |
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We have seen the 2013 WC pairing system in action exactly once. I like it in all the priorities except one: how players are ranked within their score group.
We saw after two rounds that the players in the top score group were ranked almost exactly opposite their initial seeds. This tells me that we overdid it on the principle of excluding pre-tournament information.
In my opinion there is a balance between using seed ratings to preserve climatic pairings for later in the tournament (a benefit) and rewarding rating manipulators (a detriment). I simply don't buy into the idea that internal evidence of playing strength, however weak and tenuous, should override pre-tournament evidence of playing strength, however well-established. We need to restore the balance so that 1 vs. 3 pairings don't happen in an early round of a 40-player tournament.
The next thing to try is exactly what Janzert suggested: eliminate the unseeded tournament performance rating (UTPR) and use only the seeded tournament performance rating (STPR) to rank within a score group. Not only is it simpler, I expect it will strike a better balance between pre-tournament and in-tournament information.
For starters, an early-round bye won't drop the #1 seed to the bottom of the top score group. The #1 seed might lose a place or two, or even stay #1 if the other top players had wins over noobs instead of a bye. That's fine by me. I don't think that the #10 seed trouncing the #31 seed is such a great accomplishment that it should catapult him above an idle #1 seed, unless their ratings were quite close to begin with.
And the improvement won't just be in the handling of byes. More generally the STRP rankings will be likely to make only small changes in the seed ordering in early rounds, unlike the complete scrambling after the second round we had last year. Only in later rounds will in-tournament strength of schedule completely dominate pre-tournament rating. This is what I originally envisioned. I hoped the UTPR would serve as a better formula for SoS than we had been using, but it wasn't. Now I hope that STPR will be better than either.
Of course, just like using UTPR in 2013, the consequences of using STPR in 2014 could be surprising. We could find out it lands us back in the situation of rewarding top seed(s) too much, thus encouraging rating manipulation too much. I doubt it will happen, but you never know. I think we have to try to it to find out, simply because UTPR was unsatisfactory in 2013.
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Janzert
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #11 on: Sep 26th, 2013, 11:13am » |
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on Sep 25th, 2013, 11:28pm, Fritzlein wrote:
Did you leave off some parentheses there?
seed = (1400 + (WHRH * # of games )) / (# of games + 1) |
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Sorry, I unthinkingly decided that all those parantheses weren't really needed when writing the post.
Quote:seed = (1400 + gameroom + (WHRH * # of games )) / (# of games + 2)
I prefer this to your original proposal, because it differentiates players with no WHRH. |
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The starting gameroom rating is 1400 anyway so do you think the dummy rating is still worthwhile? It is essentially just reducing the magnitude of gameroom rating change and lowering the influence of WHRH on low number of game players. The former seems that it may be beneficial the latter less so. In which case maybe it should be:
seed = (( (1400 + gameroom) / 2 ) + (WHRH * # games)) / (# games + 1)
But I'm not sure the complication is worth it over simply:
seed = (gameroom + (WHRH * # games)) / (# games + 1)
Janzert
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #12 on: Sep 26th, 2013, 12:18pm » |
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on Sep 26th, 2013, 11:13am, Janzert wrote:In which case maybe it should be:
seed = (( (1400 + gameroom) / 2 ) + (WHRH * # games)) / (# games + 1) |
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Agreed.
Quote:| But I'm not sure the complication is worth it |
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There will be players who have played against bots but not against other humans. I do think it is worth using that information rather than seeding all such players at 1400. Of course there could also be players without any games at all, either against bots or humans, who would still enter at 1400, but I can't recall any such registrants in the past.
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Janzert
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #13 on: Sep 26th, 2013, 1:41pm » |
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I must not have been clear. The complication I'm not sure that is worth keeping is the 1400 dummy rating. I've come around to using the gameroom rating already. 
One of my original reasons for dropping the gameroom ratings was that for some reason I was thinking that they neither had the same anchor nor the same scale as WHR ratings. But that is incorrect, at least in theory the scale should be the same. Also in practice the anchoring seems to not be extremely different. I was further thinking that like last year it would be a binary choice of one or the other which seemed a mess to sort out.
Using a weighted average between gameroom and WHR seems a workable and practical solution.
Janzert
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #14 on: Sep 26th, 2013, 11:25pm » |
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on Sep 26th, 2013, 1:41pm, Janzert wrote:| I must not have been clear. The complication I'm not sure that is worth keeping is the 1400 dummy rating. I've come around to using the gameroom rating already. |
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Oh, sorry. You were perfectly clear. I just read too fast and misunderstood.
Quote:| seed = (gameroom + (WHRH * # games)) / (# games + 1) |
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So someone who has no WHRH rating would be seeded entirely by their gameroom rating? Nightmare scenario there is someone creating a new account, bot-bashing up to 2800 rating, declining to play any humans, and getting the top seed.
My thought was that if someone can botbash up to 2800 but only gets seeded at [1400 + 2800]/2 = 2100 is someone who could legitimately get a 2100 WHRH or better, and thus would have an incentive to work on the WHRH rather than trying to game the system.
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| « Last Edit: Sep 26th, 2013, 11:25pm by Fritzlein » |
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