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Topic: 2014 World Championship Rules (Read 13241 times) |
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Janzert
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #45 on: Oct 14th, 2013, 9:26pm » |
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Since the phrase is only there as an example and meant to help clarify the rules, but seems to only be confusing it more, I've dropped the phrase about chat and broadcasts. I also removed the word 'illegally' in the phrase about giving, receiving, asking or offering advice since it might imply that there is a legal way to do so. The example now reads:
Quote:| Cheating in a game by giving, receiving, offering or asking for advice; by consulting written sources or Arimaa engines (a.k.a. bots); by tampering with the server; or in any other manner. |
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Great discussion on it by the way, please keep it coming. Don't feel like you may hurt my feelings by voicing any concerns you have with any part of the rules.
Janzert
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Janzert
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #46 on: Oct 23rd, 2013, 10:28pm » |
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Aside from the method of server monitoring, I think I've now made all the major changes from last year that I was considering. So if there are any other updates or additional situations that should still be covered, now would be a really good time to speak up.
Janzert
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clyring
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #47 on: Oct 30th, 2013, 11:26pm » |
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Rereading the current draft, I noticed that finalists are ranked first by total wins excluding byes. I know this was done last year as well, but it seems strange: Why are they initially ranked by wins and not by round reached or wins including byes?
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #48 on: Oct 31st, 2013, 10:37am » |
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on Oct 30th, 2013, 11:26pm, clyring wrote:| Rereading the current draft, I noticed that finalists are ranked first by total wins excluding byes. I know this was done last year as well, but it seems strange: Why are they initially ranked by wins and not by round reached or wins including byes? |
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Because if a bye counted as a win, that would make byes too beneficial. The thought was that if you got a bye, your schedule was automatically weaker than some who went out in the same round but didn't get a bye. Unfortunately, that logic doesn't hold true. Therefore, with byes not counting as wins, they can be too harmful.
I'm looking in particular at the 2013 results with browni3141 placing 8th and omar placing 9th. Comparing their respective strength of schedule, omar clearly faced tougher opposition despite getting a bye. Omar should have finished ahead of browni3141 despite having fewer over-the-board wins.
On the other hand, I think counting byes as wins will even more likely result in the reverse injustice, i.e. someone with five "wins" (including a bye) might clearly have a weaker schedule than someone with four wins not including a bye, which would make it unfair to automatically place the player with five "wins" ahead of the player with four. My hunch is that counting byes as wins is even worse than not counting them as wins.
Because I see clear cases where strength of schedule is more important in my mind than W-L record, I am currently leaning towards wanting the final ranking to go by seeded tournament performance rating, i.e. ignoring byes and W-L record. But I am hesitant to recommend this because it is such a radical change, and radical changes often have unintended consequences. So I'm not sure what to think.
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| « Last Edit: Oct 31st, 2013, 10:46am by Fritzlein » |
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clyring
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #49 on: Oct 31st, 2013, 3:50pm » |
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I considered the reverse injustice, but intuitively decided it was probably less likely in general by thinking about a pairwise comparison of the strengths of the opponents faced by two players with N wins and 3 losses, one receiving a bye and the other receiving no bye. It is possible, but not more likely than the same situation with no byes involved at all in my estimation. Just ordering by raw performance rating would also be perfectly acceptable to me, but is somewhat less transparent from the tournament results and can lead to some weirdness where non-finalists can sometimes be ranked above finalists when there is no specific clause to avoid this.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #50 on: Oct 31st, 2013, 5:26pm » |
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on Oct 31st, 2013, 3:50pm, clyring wrote:| I considered the reverse injustice, but intuitively decided it was probably less likely in general by thinking about a pairwise comparison of the strengths of the opponents faced by two players with N wins and 3 losses, one receiving a bye and the other receiving no bye. It is possible, but not more likely than the same situation with no byes involved at all in my estimation. |
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Perhaps my intuition is too influenced by 2007. http://arimaa.com/arimaa/wc/2007/showGames.cgi
After four rounds, compare me to the other survivors: I had the bye and my three opponents were weaker than the weakest three of other players who made it to round 5.
If the byes-count-as-wins rule had been in effect, I would have taken second place ahead of PMertens automatically. But we each won five over the board. Discounting our two head-to-head games which we split, and our common opponent of chessandgo, my opponents were chessandgo, Chegorimaa, seanick, and IdahoEv, while his were robinson, 99of9, Adanac, and Tore. Clearly he had the tougher opponents, and would have earned a higher tournament performance rating.
So this is one historical case where counting byes as wins would have caused the reverse injustice. But the pairing rules are rather different now, so it is probably less likely than it was then.
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| « Last Edit: Oct 31st, 2013, 5:37pm by Fritzlein » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #51 on: Oct 31st, 2013, 5:46pm » |
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on Oct 31st, 2013, 3:50pm, clyring wrote:| [...]can lead to some weirdness where non-finalists can sometimes be ranked above finalists when there is no specific clause to avoid this. |
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I'm completely in favor of a specific clause that all finalists finish ahead of all non-finalists. A reversal in performance rating wouldn't bother me at all in that case. You see it all the time in golf: someone misses the cut with 7 over par, and someone who makes the cut goes on to finish 19 over par, not only worse absolutely, but worse on average. It's almost inevitable just due to random fluctuation that someone who did well in early rounds will do horribly in later rounds. Still the guy who missed the cut gets no prize money and the guy who made the cut gets a payout. That's the way a hard cutoff works: no matter how badly you do after making the cut, you still made the cut.
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| « Last Edit: Oct 31st, 2013, 5:48pm by Fritzlein » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #52 on: Oct 31st, 2013, 5:56pm » |
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on Sep 30th, 2013, 9:24am, aaaa wrote:| No matter how slight, do we really want to allow even for the possibility that the same set of games plus outcomes can lead to a different final ranking depending on what the players' seed ratings were? |
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By the way, this scenario occurred in 2013. Supersamu finished 10th and Alfons 11th according to unseeded TPR which was in effect. But Alfons's seed rating was 2430.7 to supersamu's seed rating of 1978.3. That difference was large enough so that, even though game results have a heavier impact, it would have pulled Alfons past supersamu into 10th place had we used seeded TPR for rankings. So the probability that final ranking will change between UTPR and STPR might not be so slight after all.
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Janzert
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #53 on: Oct 31st, 2013, 11:13pm » |
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on Oct 31st, 2013, 5:56pm, Fritzlein wrote:
By the way, this scenario occurred in 2013. Supersamu finished 10th and Alfons 11th according to unseeded TPR which was in effect. But Alfons's seed rating was 2430.7 to supersamu's seed rating of 1978.3. That difference was large enough so that, even though game results have a heavier impact, it would have pulled Alfons past supersamu into 10th place had we used seeded TPR for rankings. So the probability that final ranking will change between UTPR and STPR might not be so slight after all. |
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There are actually 2 pairs in the finalists last year that swap places between UTPR and STPR. Adanac and Rabbits being the other one.
Janzert
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Janzert
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #54 on: Oct 31st, 2013, 11:27pm » |
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By the way, I'm not dedicated to any particular method for ranking the finalists beyond the top 3. However, I do pretty firmly believe the tournament constraints we have to live with just don't provide enough evidence to really give a completely accurate ranking. So any method used is likely to produce anomalies that seem wrong at times.
Wins without byes, wins with byes, straight STPR, all seem to be reasonable choices. If the community were to reach some sort of consensus to switch I would not mind doing so at all. Otherwise the default is to just carry on with last years choice (i.e. wins without byes).
Janzert
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aaaa
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #55 on: Nov 1st, 2013, 10:19am » |
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At the very least, I oppose performance ratings ever overruling any "hard" counts (i.e. wins, losses, byes or combinations thereof) in any context, whether it's when determining a scheduling or the final ranking.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #56 on: Nov 1st, 2013, 10:39am » |
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on Oct 31st, 2013, 11:27pm, Janzert wrote:| However, I do pretty firmly believe the tournament constraints we have to live with just don't provide enough evidence to really give a completely accurate ranking. So any method used is likely to produce anomalies that seem wrong at times. |
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That's a very good point. There just isn't enough information for a good ranking; we're going to have to live with "wrong" rankings.
As I revisit my logic, I realize that I want STPR for the pairings, particularly in early rounds, because I think UTPR has far too little information to work with to keep the pairings meaningful (as opposed to random) and to save climactic pairings for later rounds. But when we get to the rankings of the finalists for prize distribution, my priorities change. By then UTPR has six games to work with for all non-finalists and seven or more games to work with for all finalists, so I am less worried that UTPR contains too little information. At that point I would be more worried about the unfairness of letting pre-tournament ratings affect the rankings too much.
So I guess I am now leaning towards wanting STPR to be used during pairing and UTPR for the final ranking, even though there is an apparent inconsistency there, as aaaa pointed out. I would maintain that it is logical to use STPR for pairings and UTPR for prizes, though, because the quality of UTPR is so bad at the beginning of the tournament but arguably good enough by the end.
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aaaa
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #57 on: Nov 2nd, 2013, 2:44pm » |
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Then any playoff game should also be based on the UTPR rather than the STPR.
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Janzert
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #58 on: Nov 7th, 2013, 2:48pm » |
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I've been working on pairing programs and have found a discrepancy between the written rules and the implementation used on the server. The rules say that for the purposes of pairing players are ranked in ascending order of number of losses then by TPR (UTPR then STPR last year and just STPR this year). The implementation* though just ranks by TPR. For most tournaments (including last year's WC) this makes no difference.
I'm thinking that ranking first by losses is probably the way to go, but anyone have any thoughts on this?
Janzert
* There also seems to be a bug that rarely gets the rank order wrong when utpr is tied and it needs to tie break with stpr. Not sure what is triggering or going wrong with that yet.
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aaaa
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Re: 2014 World Championship Rules
« Reply #59 on: Nov 7th, 2013, 9:32pm » |
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Can you give a set of input that reliably reproduces these errors?
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