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Title: 2011 World Championship Post by aaaa on Nov 24th, 2010, 11:41am Would it be an idea to give the remaining 2 players of the championship each an additional life in order to increase the acceptability of the outcome? |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Nov 25th, 2010, 10:38pm Not sure how much of a difference it would make in more accurately selecting the best player. Can you run some simulations to find out? |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Adanac on Dec 21st, 2010, 10:54am Does anyone have the URL for selecting preferred game times for the upcoming World Championship? I used to have the link but can't find it. Thanks! |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Dec 23rd, 2010, 9:18am Here is the link to set your default preferred game times: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/gameroom/selectTimes.cgi When I create the 2011 WC event using the tournament tool, it will copy over these times and you will be emailed the URL (different than the above) to update your preferred times for the 2011 WC event. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Hippo on Dec 28th, 2010, 3:15pm Wow, were there so many registered players for arimaa WC ever? I am really looking forward to it. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Eltripas on Dec 28th, 2010, 9:42pm on 12/28/10 at 15:15:58, Hippo wrote:
But someone is missing in the list (Hippo)! Why? |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by rabbits on Dec 28th, 2010, 11:29pm on 12/28/10 at 21:42:39, Eltripas wrote:
Eltripas, I don't see your name on the list either!! You should both play! |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Hippo on Dec 29th, 2010, 2:30am on 12/28/10 at 21:42:39, Eltripas wrote:
I have signed yesterday, don't worry. (Just having problems with sending money from an account to the pay-pal.) |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by woh on Dec 29th, 2010, 6:04am on 12/28/10 at 15:15:58, Hippo wrote:
Yes, there were 26 registered players for the 2008 WC. Only a few extra players needed to break this record. After 2 year with a declining number of participants it is indeed nice to have again more players entering the WC. There are already as many nations represented as ever: 10, the same as in 2007, vs. 9 in 2008 and 2009. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Dec 29th, 2010, 10:01am I think the field of players in the WC this year is much stronger than we've ever had before. I'm looking forward to many hard fought, high quality games this year. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Hippo on Dec 29th, 2010, 3:04pm on 12/29/10 at 02:30:39, Hippo wrote:
Who here in comunity has IBAN+BIC and no problems with sending money to PAY-PAL? I would prefere to send money directly to Omar, but ... |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by ginrunner on Dec 29th, 2010, 3:35pm I am almost positive Omar would not mind anyone sending him a check directly. He is extremely flexible or at least was so in my case because I do not use pay pal at all. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by rbarreira on Dec 29th, 2010, 4:05pm on 12/29/10 at 15:04:34, Hippo wrote:
Isn't it much easier to use a debit/credit card to make the payment? I think that's what I did and it was pretty easy. But maybe not everyone uses cards... |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by arimaa_master on Dec 29th, 2010, 5:11pm on 12/29/10 at 15:04:34, Hippo wrote:
I sent you an e-mail with the instructions about filling paypal account from the Czech Republic bank account. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Hippo on Dec 29th, 2010, 5:11pm on 12/29/10 at 16:05:20, rbarreira wrote:
Seems I would be able to pair my credit card with pay-pal at last. ... |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Hippo on Dec 30th, 2010, 1:48am I would expect Ivan and Trevor on the list as well. Will you participate? P.S.: And what about Paul? P.P.S.: What about onigawara? P.P.P.S.: And hanzack ... didn't you change your mind ... |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Sconibulus on Dec 30th, 2010, 12:29pm I hadn't planned on it, I know I'm not one of the top 10-15 at this point, and hockey and school are starting up again in a couple weeks which really cut into the free time. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Dec 30th, 2010, 4:10pm I count 23 registered players, which puts us right on the bubble. If nobody else signs up, the preliminary tournament will have five rounds, but as soon as we hit 24 players the preliminary tournament expands to six rounds. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Hippo on Dec 31st, 2010, 3:23am Wow hanzack signed. Hope he will play his best :) |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Dec 31st, 2010, 8:56am on 12/31/10 at 03:23:12, Hippo wrote:
That's good news! But hanzack's rating will play havoc with the tournament seedings. Also tournament games are rated, so he will rob rating points from his opponents unless he resigns at the end of won games. Perhaps Omar can negotiate for hazack to play rated games, not resign, and have his rating reset to 2000 before the tournament starts. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Eltripas on Dec 31st, 2010, 1:10pm on 12/30/10 at 01:48:51, Hippo wrote:
I'm not going to enter this year mainly due the fact that I suck, but don't worry guys I will watch the games and may do awful commentary on some. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Hippo on Jan 1st, 2011, 4:41am Ivan ... I suppose there are 3-4 persons with ambitions to gain WC title, around 16 with ambitions to make top 8. Even if you don't have these ambitions, it's the best oportunity to play good games against good opponents. You have learned a lot by watching. Participating is even much inspiring. I hope you gain more confidenccenext year ... :). BTW: 27 participants ... amazing And the skill levell, ... with hanzack real skill in mind. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 1st, 2011, 9:41am on 12/31/10 at 13:10:04, Eltripas wrote:
Last year I would have seconded that logic, but in this year's field someone rated in the 1800's like yourself would have three or four good games out of the six rounds, so I don't think you need to hesitate. Of course, as of my writing you only have eight hours left to change your mind. :o |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 1st, 2011, 10:25am on 12/31/10 at 08:56:03, Fritzlein wrote:
The ratings for the tournament will use WHR ratings (in future years the WHRE ratings will be used once that system has more games) if available and then the gameroom ratings if the WHR rating is not available for a player. hanzack's WHR is about 1530 which is probably less than his true ability, but I think that is what will have to be used for the tournament for me to follow the stated rules. I'll mention this to the TD and see if he would like me to bump up the rating that we use for hanzack during the tournament. Quote:
hanzack's gameroom rating is currently 1324 and is definitely much lower than his ability due to his habit of resigning won games against bots and playing those as rated games. Since the tournament games will effect the gameroom ratings, it can cause hanzack's opponents on average to lose more rating points than would be expected. The players who have a higher gameroom rating than hanzack, but have less Arimaa experience than him will be most effected. However, I've been saying for a while now that the gameroom ratings are much less important since we have WHR ratings for seeding the tournaments. I myself have been letting my gameroom rating get thrashed by playing rated Blitz games and losing most of them on time. So even I would be causing my opponents to lose on average more gameroom rating points than would be expected. Thus, I don't think that I should modify hanzack's gameroom rating to try to minimize havoc. My apologies to players who would have their gameroom rating negatively impacted by players like hanzack and myself. However, keep in mind that the gameroom ratings are not a good reflection of your true ability and that the WHR and WHRE ratings are much better at measuring that. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by qswanger on Jan 1st, 2011, 10:41am So I noticed that the entry deadline is "6PM EST Saturday January 1st, 2011" and decided to make a last second decision to enter. What the heck. So, I made the required donation and I think the site said I was registered, but I did not see that my name was added/updated to the list of registered players. I got the paypal donation receipt. Can someone tell me if I managed to register successfully, or if there's something else I need to do. Thanks. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Sconibulus on Jan 1st, 2011, 1:20pm Oh to hell with it, I'll have a few weeks yet before anything starts, and even then it doesn't eat ALL my time, especially not early on while homework's light. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 1st, 2011, 2:29pm on 01/01/11 at 10:41:01, qswanger wrote:
Sorry for my delay in activating the registrations today. Yes, you are successfully registered now. Thanks for signing up and best of luck in your games. We are now up to 31 players. We've surpassed the previous record of 26. I am really amazed at the turn out. This is definitely going to be the best World Championship tournament we've ever had. A big thanks to everyone who signed up. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Belteshazzar on Jan 1st, 2011, 4:02pm I clicked the option to register, but haven't donated to the prize fund yet. If I don't donate by the deadline (an hour from now), will it be too late? |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Eltripas on Jan 1st, 2011, 4:56pm on 01/01/11 at 09:41:01, Fritzlein wrote:
In fact the main reason is that I have a "situation" that doesn't requires to much time but may interfere any moment, the fact that I suck is the second reason with a close third being the lack of money because I just bought a new laptop. Hopefully I will be able to participate the next year. on 01/01/11 at 10:25:05, omar wrote:
Modifying Hanzack's ratings doesn't just minimize havoc, Hanzack takes the rating issue seriously and may lose the games just to maintain his rating low, modifying Hanzack's rating could also remove his motivation to lose. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 1st, 2011, 5:20pm Wow, over thirty players signed up for a tournament with an entry fee. What an incredible day for Arimaa! It is inspiring to see the Arimaa community keep growing steadily and surely. Congratulations, Omar! |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Hippo on Jan 1st, 2011, 5:31pm Ivan, I hope the money are not the main reason ... if you don't count time=money. Otherwise, we could support your appearence on WC. I don't think there should be something done with hanzack rating. EXCEPT, some special penalty for intentional losing during WC. But I do think his plan is to play with c&g what does not allow intentional losing. Yes we would share his previous intentional loses in our ratings, but I don't think it's a problem. I use to play rated games against bots even when I know I am tired and I would not play my best. ... I suppose most of us does similarly. In the preparation 30s turnament I attend even with a connection not allowing thinking ... the ratings will never reflect players abillities perfectly, they are just rather good approximation. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by qswanger on Jan 1st, 2011, 6:11pm Alright ... exactly 32 players! I smell a bracket! |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 1st, 2011, 6:19pm on 01/01/11 at 18:11:49, qswanger wrote:
Gosh, I was wondering whether we would have enough players (24) to mandate a six-round preliminary, and we almost got enough players (36) to mandate a seven-round preliminary. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 1st, 2011, 6:52pm on 01/01/11 at 16:02:51, Belteshazzar wrote:
I've activated your registration. You can send the donation after the deadline; no problem. There are also a few others who are in the same situation. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 1st, 2011, 6:58pm I am extending the registration deadline to 10pm EST in case we have more people change their mind about joining at the last minute. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by aaaa on Jan 2nd, 2011, 5:08pm The seeds are about to be determined, so if you still want them to be derived from ratings that are calculated on the basis of some empirically derived pair of WHR parameters, my latest values are 1.2 wins per 2.4 games and 170 Elo^2/day. Of course, it doesn't necessarily have to lead to a change of the relative ranking of the participants. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 2nd, 2011, 9:33pm on 01/02/11 at 17:08:36, aaaa wrote:
aaaa, I am using the WHR values posted by woh. If you could also post your values somewhere we would be able to compare them and possibly use them in the future. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 2nd, 2011, 9:36pm All players should have received the welcome message by now. In case anyone has not I have posted it here: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/wc/2011/welcome.html The most important thing for players to do right now is enter their preferred game times before Monday night 8pm EST. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by ginrunner on Jan 2nd, 2011, 10:36pm Is it possible to set up times with the opponents individually? When school starts back up again I will have free time (sorta) again but during the break I tend to work 70 hour weeks and have no specific time that I am free every week. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 2nd, 2011, 10:52pm on 01/02/11 at 22:36:24, ginrunner wrote:
Yes, it is possible for you to agree on a time with your opponent. However, in case you can't find a mutually agreeable time, it is necessary to go through the impartial scheduler for fairness sake. Otherwise we could end in the impossible situation of having no game scheduled and both players claiming it was the other player's fault. Each week you have to mark 60 times even if you don't have 60 times you can play during that week. Mark the times you can play as one of the top four preferences and then mark as fifth preference enough extra times to get up to sixty. Hopefully you will never get scheduled for a time you can't play, and if you do, hopefully you can work out an alternative time with your opponent, but if worst comes to worst, the scheduler time is what must be the official game time. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by ginrunner on Jan 3rd, 2011, 12:23am woohoo for bartending. all of my "best times" are 2am and after. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by RonWeasley on Jan 3rd, 2011, 6:27am I have decided that there will not be any ratings adjustment for specific players in this 2011 WC. Even though there is evidence of rating manipulation, I can find no consistent standard by which I can distinguish ratings that should be adjusted from those that should not. Even if inaccurate ratings could be reliably identified, there is no consistent procedure to adjust that rating. There are many ways players have fun on this site, some of which affect ratings, and I don't think I can enumerate how the site should be used. Furthermore, I assert that a six game Swiss qualifying round is not so overly sensitive to ratings error that the players making the cut would not all be deserving. An underrated player may win in the early rounds, but will be forced to play the high rated players soon enough. I realize there will be some effect, and that this effect is not desirable, but believe that this "noise" is not a domininant factor. So the ruling is that no special action will be taken this year. I would be interested in simulation experiments investigating the sensitivity of ratings inaccuracy on resulting standings after six rounds. This would serve to confirm or refute my intuition. TD |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by jdb on Jan 3rd, 2011, 11:53am I would suggest having a ruling prepared if someone resigns a won game. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 3rd, 2011, 12:36pm on 01/03/11 at 11:53:28, jdb wrote:
Indeed, let's go beyond having a ruling prepared; let's talk to hanzack about his intentions in advance. He is often in the chat room, so someone could open a dialog with him even if he isn't reading this thread. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World ChampionshipMy first reaction is th Post by RonWeasley on Jan 3rd, 2011, 5:35pm on 01/03/11 at 11:53:28, jdb wrote:
My first reaction is the resigning player loses the game. Trying to find a more sinister motive, I can think of 1) to mess with our heads, man; or 2) a conspiracy to give wins to an undeserving player. The first is annoying, but should have an effect on only standings near the bottom. The incidental beneficiaries of improper resignations would be near the bottom to have games against the offending player. The second would only work in the earliest rounds unless some very good players participated. I don't expect that this year. If it happens in any year, the community has a bigger problem than just the WC tournament. This is a good time to voice concerns I haven't thought of yet. These debates always help me be a better TD. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World ChampionshipMy first reaction is th Post by Eltripas on Jan 4th, 2011, 12:31am on 01/03/11 at 17:35:34, RonWeasley wrote:
Actually Hanzack's motive is to keep his rating as low as possible, (I don't know if that enters in the category "to mess with our heads, man"), but I think that he may resign only some games (the ones that affect more his rating) which may be unfair to his other opponents, so I suggest that, if he resigns a game he gets a warning that if he does that again he is going to be kicked out of the tournament. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by jdb on Jan 4th, 2011, 5:54am My game is scheduled for Sunday at 12:00am. I did not select that time slot at all on the scheduler. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 4th, 2011, 6:13am on 01/03/11 at 11:53:28, jdb wrote:
This is something that we have not considered before. We have always assumed that players will play to win. But a player may intentionally lose a game either to lower their rating (perhaps to enter a tournament in the future which is limited to players under a certain rating) or to help another player do better in the current tournament. I'm sure this has been encountered in Chess tournaments and there are probably rules to handle it. I think the consequences for throwing a game should be part of the tournament rules while the determination of whether or not a player has thrown a game should be made by the TD. It's too late to change the rules for this year, but next year I will add something like the following: "If the tournament director determines that a player has intentionally lost a game, the player will be eliminated from the tournament and will not be allowed to take part in future rated events for 2 year." I consider this to be as severe as intentionally cheating to try and win. The key role of the tournament director is to make a determination when a special situation or dispute arises. The extent of a tournament directors ability to punish a player should be limited to eliminating the player from the current event. Punishments which ban a player from future events should be part of the written rules of the event. Although having such rules in place is good for handling a situation when it arises, I totally agree with Karl that we should apply some social and peer pressure to prevent it from happening in the first place. I will send an email to hanzack and if others see him in chat, please discuss this with him and let him know that we would not want to see him throwing games. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by DonEsteban on Jan 4th, 2011, 7:48am on 01/04/11 at 06:13:56, omar wrote:
I've never heard of it or any Chess tournament rules to sanction this kind of behavior. That doesn't mean that it never happens, but I don't expect it to be a wide-spread problem for several reasons: a) Players who have reached a certain level usually play to win. b) Players wouldn't usually risk their reputation by intentionally letting someone else win (or profiting from such players). c) In order to win a tournament, you still have to beat the strongest player(s). So, yes, you can get an advantage by winning against dummy players, but it usually won't be decisive, especially in elimination-mode tournaments. This all goes mainly for real-life tournaments. The question of false/double nicks is very real, but I haven't so far heard of a practical solution to prevent it. So I suggest we just stay relaxed and hope that the vast majority of players will be interested in a fair and sporting competition. After all this is basically just a fun sport and there are not millions of dollars at stake. Otherwise (as an outsider and lacking any further knowledge of the concrete problem at hand) I'd fully agree with you, omar. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 4th, 2011, 9:26am on 01/04/11 at 07:48:21, DonEsteban wrote:
Actually, the USCF in the past encountered severe problems with people intentionally losing games, or "sandbagging" as it was called. The reason people intentionally lost games was to lower their ratings and thereby gain entry into lower divisions. For example, a player whose true strength was 1900 would not have very good chances to win the "under 2000" division, but if he intentionally lost games to get a rating below 1800, he would have great chances to win the "under 1800" division, and the accompanying prize money. The USCF addressed the problem by barring people from the "under X" sections on the basis of career peak rating rather than on the basis of current rating. Also FIDE historically had problems with people intentionally losing/drawing games. In the Soviet era, the qualifying tournaments for the World Championship were round-robins in which several of the players were Soviets, since they had many of the world's top players. If they all were careful not to beat their top player, then their top player had far better odds of advancing. The Soviets never admitted to cheating, but statistical analysis shows that it almost certainly happened. FIDE addressed this problem by switching to an elimination format rather than a round-robin format. I agree that the Arimaa community can and should primarily rely on everyone to try hard to win every game, but the experience of chess doesn't guide us to ignore the possibility of intentional losses. On the contrary, chess teaches us that it will happen unless we take reasonable steps to forestall it. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 4th, 2011, 10:06am on 01/04/11 at 05:54:23, jdb wrote:
I thought midnight was an odd time for you; I recall you preferring early times to late times in the past. Anyway, the way I understand the scheduler, it is impossible for you to be scheduled for a time that is selected as no preference, i.e. not even lowest preference, so this must be a bug of some sort. Omar and Ron are going to get an early start on rulings this tournament! |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by jdb on Jan 4th, 2011, 12:01pm on 01/04/11 at 10:06:13, Fritzlein wrote:
It looks like the scheduler thinks 12:00am is at night. I did select 12 noon on Sunday as a time . Maybe the game room time means 12 noon? At any rate, I cannot play on Sunday at midnight, there is a prior commitment. To be clear, I selected slots 90 and 102. I did not select slot 78, which I think the game is scheduled for. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Eltripas on Jan 4th, 2011, 12:07pm on 01/04/11 at 12:01:06, jdb wrote:
To be fair, 12:00 am is at night, but this kind of confusion is why the 24h hour should be used. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by aaaa on Jan 4th, 2011, 12:19pm The color coding is there to prevent any time-of-day confusion. It could be that jdb hadn't used the right scheduler for the championship, meaning that there were no preferential data for the algorithm to use, resulting in it simply picking a most-preferred time slot from his opponent. The scheduling page should be changed to prominently display for which event the time slot preferences apply. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Hippo on Jan 4th, 2011, 1:19pm Yes, I have filled the schedule when I registered, fortunately I have checked the schedule once more later and discovered it was not WC2011 scheduler (so I have rescheduled in time, but jdb could have less luck). |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 4th, 2011, 5:53pm Based on a rough calculation, after six rounds there should be about eleven players with a record of 4-2 or better. This means that about three players with a 4-2 record will be eliminated due to weak strength of schedule. Only the approximately three players with a 5-1 record will be in the finals for sure. In short, as usual, strength of schedule will be critically important. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Nombril on Jan 4th, 2011, 10:03pm on 01/04/11 at 17:53:12, Fritzlein wrote:
I still think it is insane to use SOS to determine who will be in the finals. (OK - maybe that is a bit stronger language than I used last year. :P ) I'm not a tournament expert, but after a quick look at the wikipedia article on SOS, it seems that for major sports: a. SOS is irrelevant because all teams play each other, b. SOS has been eliminated from use (in the college bowl rankings - which seemed to be the major user of SOS), or c. a playoff system is used to avoid having to use SOS to determine anything other than initial seedings for a playoff tournament. I understand that the #8 and #9 player probably have equal odds at winning the tournament. But based on pre-tournament rankings and the results of the last three WCs, making the final 8 might be the realistic goal for many (most?) of the other players to be aiming for. I assume it is too late to change anything for this year... but for future consideration: Would there be any drawback to having 1 extra game, where just the bottom portion of the 'split' win grouping play each other? The size of the bottom portion would be set so that the winners of that 'playoff' would be in the final 8. (In Fritz's rough estimate, the single top 4-2 player (based on SOS) gets in automatically, but the bottom 6 have a playoff for the last 3 spots: one undefeated, three 5-1 records, one 4-2 automatic bid, and three 4-2 +playoff winners.) With such a small number of games, I still have a hard time believing that SOS isn't at least partly random, or at least a function of pre-tournament rankings (since they dictated the initial seeds). Maybe the math would prove my gut feeling wrong. It just seems to be more 'fair' to have your 'destiny' in your own hands, rather that calculating various scenarios in the last round for others to win/loose to allow you to make the finals. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by 99of9 on Jan 4th, 2011, 10:33pm on 12/23/10 at 09:18:40, omar wrote:
I did this, but it appears that the wrong preferences were copied over (maybe last years?). I can play 24 hours before my scheduled time, but will find it very difficult to play at the scheduled time. I will be out of internet contact for the next 24 hours, but will send a message to my opponent now. Sorry for not checking in after the preliminary schedule was organized, but I have been away from computers all week. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 4th, 2011, 11:21pm on 01/04/11 at 22:03:14, Nombril wrote:
I think it is problematic to decide by SoS, but playing extra rounds of preliminary is also problematic. Quote:
Actually every one of the computer rankings in the BCS uses SoS. That is how the computers could put a two-loss Oklahoma ahead of a one-loss Ohio State. But even though the BCS uses SoS, given how unpopular it is, I don't think we want to imitate them. Quote:
My preference would be to get rid of the gap between the preliminaries and the finals. Why have a playoff to determine who is in the playoff? Why not instead unify the tournament into an open triple-elimination? The original justification for having a preliminary and a finals was to provide an event in which everyone could participate and have a good time. That made some sense when there were no other events all year to have fun in, but now we have the Arimaa World League and one-day tournaments. We don't have to make the World Championship serve a double purpose. If the only purpose of the World Championship tournament is to crown a World Champion, then it is OK to have some people take three tough beatings and go home. We don't have to make it fun for all entries. Furthermore, getting rid of the division between a preliminary and a final gets rid of the problem of how to limit the field to eight; the field is narrowed by losses, and everyone gets three. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 4th, 2011, 11:45pm on 01/04/11 at 22:33:10, 99of9 wrote:
Darn, I forgot that when it doesn't find any game times selected for the event it first looks for previous event game times before checking the default game times. Please let me know if you and your opponent agree to a different time. I will change it manually. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 4th, 2011, 11:56pm on 01/04/11 at 12:01:06, jdb wrote:
Sorry Jeff, I think you encountered the same problem as Toby. If you agree to a different time with your opponent please let me know and I will change it manually. If anyone else encountered this, please let me know the new time you agreed to with your opponent. I've made a change to the programs so that this does not happen in future years. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by ginrunner on Jan 4th, 2011, 11:57pm I got off work to play my game lol ... actually i just traded shifts but still ... I am committed lol |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 5th, 2011, 12:22am on 01/04/11 at 23:21:29, Fritzlein wrote:
Yes, I think with more events throughout the year the WC can be focused more on trying to selecting the best player. Maybe we should consider a format change for next year. The only problem with floating-triple-elimination is it takes longer to finish. I would like the WC to not take more than a maximum of 12 weeks. That's why I tend to favor floating-double-elimination. I would consider floating-triple-elimination, but we would have to restrict entry to just the 8 highest rated players who register. Maybe this will be OK because players who don't make this will still have opportunities to play in other events during the year. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 5th, 2011, 1:16am on 01/05/11 at 00:22:33, omar wrote:
Wait, what does your simulator say about the length of FTE for 32 players? By my calculation our current format takes 11 or 12 rounds for 32 players, whereas FTE takes 11, 12, or 13 rounds for 32 players. How many weeks would it add on average to switch to FTE? Less than one additional week? |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Sconibulus on Jan 5th, 2011, 1:16am I really don't like the idea of only the top 8 ratings making it, that would discourage people from playing games they think they might lose if they're on the cusp. And it's hard to imagine that a combination of swiss and double elimination is less round-intensive than triple elimination. According to approximate predictions after the six rounds we'd be down to 12 players rather than 8, but about half of them would only have one loss remaining, and only one might have more than the two lives double elimination gives now. The primary problem I see with this is the games won prize. There would no longer be a clear and distinct point for it to start, although perhaps you'd earn a 'win' for each game you were above .500? |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Hippo on Jan 5th, 2011, 3:01am I would like tripple elimination with (given number of rounds played at all cases) I hope it's possible ... it would give order in "preliminary" as well as "dependence only on your behaviour". |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 5th, 2011, 10:42am on 01/05/11 at 01:16:17, Fritzlein wrote:
Here are the results of running 100 FTE tournaments with 8 player (using aaaa's program); a rating distribution range of 500; rating inaccuracy of 50 and 0.0 percent probability of draws: Code:
16 players: Code:
It gets stuck on pairing round 3 when I try it with 32 players. Running one tournament with 20 players takes about 8 seconds. When I go to 22 players it gets stuck (I waited for 5 minutes) on pairing round 2. Here are the results of running 10 tournaments with 20 players: Code:
Assuming we can cross the technical hurdle I think you are right; a 32 player FTE would on average be less than 12 rounds and worst case 13 rounds. It sounds doable!! At least we can go up to 20 players with the current algorithm. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by ocmiente on Jan 5th, 2011, 12:46pm The question about a FTE tournament style has been discussed before (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=events;action=display;num=1249653915;start=0), about 5 years ago. I would prefer a FTE tournament also. The one thing I would add is maybe that people who reach the 3 loss limit be thrown into a swiss style bracket so that they can continue playing scheduled games against other participants of similar skill levels until the tournament is over. People should be able to bow out of the tournament after their third loss, so they wouldn't have to continue playing if they did not want to. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 5th, 2011, 3:03pm on 01/05/11 at 12:46:46, ocmiente wrote:
Also in 2010 the cutoff between the preliminaries and the finals produced some dissatisfaction. In particular, I and a couple of other players who were guaranteed a spot in the finals prior to our last-round preliminary game had incentives to lose that last game to manipulate the seedings of the finals. Since losses aren't carried forward between the preliminaries and the finals, losing on purpose could have increased overall winning chances. I am pretty sure that nobody intentionally lost a game, but the awareness of the incentive to do so generated a lot of support for changing the tournament format to floating triple elimination. Unfortunately, the FTE pairing code provided by doublep runs in exponential time. We can't use it to run a large World Championship, as Omar alludes to: on 01/05/11 at 10:42:16, omar wrote:
Fortunately, aaaa managed to clear the technical hurdle with a polynomial-time algorithm (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=events;action=display;num=1249655059;start=30) eleven months ago. It remained only to work out the technical details of which pairings we would consider most desirable. We are not far from a solution. However, in light of past conflict between aaaa and myself, I would request that someone other than me work with aaaa to perfect his FTE pairing algorithm. Quote:
I quite like the option of letting eliminated players either drop out or continue playing in a parallel swiss-style consolation tournament until the conclusion of the World Championship. The main polynomial-time FTE pairing algorithm could be adapted to pair this tournament as well. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by ocmiente on Jan 5th, 2011, 3:12pm What if you ran the tournament as a swiss tournament, except that when a player has lost 3 times, they are removed from main tournament bracket and moved to a second bracket that would allow them to keep playing. As people dropped out, the remaining players in the tournament bracket from which the winner would come would have to start replaying each other - which is not strictly Swiss - and which is what you usually get in a regular double elimination type tournament. Seems like this would make the tournament shorter than 13 rounds. [Edit] Except add one other thing... in the pairings for the main tournament bracket, require that all matches be made between players that have an equal number of wins, or a difference of only one win between them. Again, this is not strictly Swiss because rematches would very likely occur, but would serve to bound the number of rounds in the tournament. [Edit] And... you would only match players with different number of wins if there was an odd number of players with some number of wins. That is, for the most part, you always want to match players with the same number of wins, and only want to match players with different number of wins if you have to. hmmm... I had no idea that these tournament systems could be so complicated. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 5th, 2011, 3:45pm on 01/05/11 at 15:12:00, ocmiente wrote:
Yes, that's exactly what we are discussing. Floating triple elimination is like a Swiss where you allow repeat pairings and stop pairing people with three or more losses. I discovered, however, that it was easier to clearly delineate the concept than to implement the algorithm. How exactly is the pairing done? Quote:
A 32-player FTE can end in eleven rounds. The reason it can go more rounds than you think is that lots of byes might have to be assigned. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by ocmiente on Jan 5th, 2011, 8:28pm well, I have some code that will do it... rough draft of course... could be bugs. This is a variant of a Swiss Tournament (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_tournament). Maybe the 'Foy System'? It's written in C# (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xQTRFa62CS2k6wAMPEoeUBTliiHsB1uDs4dKVnbjT_k/edit?hl=en&authkey=CPH0kcAJ). With 33 players I ran the simulation 50 times and had 3 times when it took 13 rounds. The others took 11 or 12. It also runs quickly - less than a second. And 1024 players took 18 rounds, and with 10,456 players it took 22 rounds :) If someone has been matched with a player before, the algorithm should probably try to find a different player who they have not played before, with the same number of losses. I suspect that that is why other matching algorithms might take a long time to complete, but I'd have to implement it to be sure. I'm also not sure how much of a difference it would make in the pairings. It would be worth experimenting with, if anyone else thinks this might be a useful tournament pairing process. Also, color assignment has to be considered. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 6th, 2011, 8:25am on 01/05/11 at 20:28:56, ocmiente wrote:
You have stated the problem in a nutshell. Perhaps in the past we should not have let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but our feeling was that we shouldn't have a pairing that included repeat matchups if there existed an alternative pairing that didn't have repeat matchups. Actually, I had a slew of criteria that Omar has encapsulated in the tournament rules: Quote:
One interesting question is how many of these principles can be guaranteed by a simple, fast algorithm. For example, it is easy to guarantee that the bye goes to a player who isn't ahead on byes (e.g. to make it impossible for some player to get two byes while another player hasn't yet had his first bye). One can simply assign the bye to an eligible player first, and then pair the remaining players. But this immediately comes into conflict with minimizing the number of repeat pairings. Perhaps there are multiple players who are equally eligible for a bye, and giving the bye to one such player forces repeat pairings whereas giving the bye to another such player allows repeat pairings to be avoided. Intuitively, one must suspect that finding an "optimal" pairing can't be done quickly. It seems reasonable that meeting a stringent list of desirability criterion would necessarily have exponential running time, i.e. would in essence be equivalent to examining every possible pairing and seeing which is best. Miraculously, however, as long as you can assign a concrete weight to each pairing saying how undesirable it is (e.g. a repeat pairing is more undesirable than pairing a 3-1 player against a 1-3 player), then there is a sophisticated algorithm which finds the optimal pairing in polynomial time. The problem is called minimum-weight perfect matching (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=events;action=display;num=1249655059;start=25). Once you have an algorithm that can do minimum-weight perfect matching, the good news is that you can assign the "badness weight" of each pairing however you like. We can debate the rules of perfect pairing, and reach a decision as to precisely what we want. Once we have set criteria as to the ideal pairing, the algorithm is guaranteed to find the pairing that is the closest possible to that ideal. The bad news is we have to debate what is ideal. It turns out to be somewhat tricky; in particular, the last criterion in the above-quoted list is problematic when players with unequal records must be paired against each other. Of course, we can at any time decide to give up on the "ideal" pairing and use a simpler algorithm to pair FTE. Maybe we should have done that long ago. on 01/05/11 at 20:28:56, ocmiente wrote:
This is one respect in which we are fortunate. For chess tournaments, color assignment is important, indeed it is important enough that tournament directors may use it to alter pairings. For example, if a pairing pits two players against each other who are both "due white" and two other players who are both "due black", the TD can break up the bad pairings and repair so that color assignment works out properly, even if the alternate pairing is less desirable in some other respect, for example because it respects folding pairing less. Playing white is so much of an advantage in chess that equalizing color must take precedence over some other things. In Arimaa, we can't tell whether Gold or Silver has the advantage, so we have the luxury of respecting all other principles of pairing first. We don't really care if both players are "due Gold"; we can flip a coin if need be. In past Arimaa tournaments, participants have felt mistreated by various pairing issues or by strength of schedule, but no one has claimed of mistreatment based on color assignment. (Well, there was one issue of a non-participant calling the tournament results into question based on color assignment, but neither the players involved nor the TD nor anyone else involved saw a problem.) The upshot is that we all seem content to do the pairings without considering color assignment at all, and then do the color assignment later as a separate process. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by ocmiente on Jan 6th, 2011, 1:09pm I've updated the code (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xQTRFa62CS2k6wAMPEoeUBTliiHsB1uDs4dKVnbjT_k/edit?hl=en&authkey=CPH0kcAJ) to prefer matches that have not happened before to ones that have. That was simpler than I expected. The number of rounds for a 33 person tournament broke down as follows: 10 rounds: 2.3% 11 rounds: 21.4% 12 rounds: 47.6% 13 rounds: 28.6% preferring to avoid previous matches appears to have made 13 rounds happen more frequently - but I'd have to run a lot more simulations to confirm that - and these simulations are based on the chosen method of deciding who wins each match. Regarding the criteria you mention, with respect to byes, they are granted to the player with the fewest number of byes so far. At the beginning of the tournament, the bye is assigned to the player with the most losses and lowest initial rating. Once the tournament reaches a point when there is only one undefeated player, or no undefeated players, the bye goes to the player with the fewest byes, then the fewest losses, then the highest initial rating. As far as avoiding previously matched opponents, the algorithm puts a priority on matching players with an equal number of losses (or at most a difference of one loss between then). Rematches are avoided when possible. With respect to the sum of the squares of... the matching function does the match using the basic Swiss method (I think that's fair to say). That is, it splits a group of players with the same number of losses (with maybe one extra if there was a leftover from the previous group) in half, and matches the first player in the upper half to the first player in the lower half. If this match has already happened, it will look for the next player that hasn't been matched in the second group, and go through the first group in reverse order if necessary to make a match. So, there's no standard deviation calculations, but I suspect that a very similar result is obtained. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Hippo on Jan 6th, 2011, 3:14pm on 01/06/11 at 08:25:43, Fritzlein wrote:
It would be nice to have minimum-weight perfect matching with lexicographical list of criterias. Wow, now when I read Omar's conditions, they are formulated such that each edge could have been assigned the "badness vector" ... so it could really work. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Janzert on Jan 6th, 2011, 4:31pm on 01/05/11 at 10:42:16, omar wrote:
Hmm, this is rather disappointing I thought the algorithm in the new code was suppose to scale much better than this. Also could someone point me at the location of the tournament simulation software, I've lost track of it. Janzert |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 6th, 2011, 9:07pm on 01/06/11 at 15:14:46, Hippo wrote:
I just wrote the script, the credit for those conditions should go to Karl. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 6th, 2011, 9:14pm on 01/06/11 at 16:31:29, Janzert wrote:
You can download it from here: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/tourn/compare/sim.tar or http://arimaa.com/arimaa/tourn/compare/sim.zip |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 6th, 2011, 10:28pm on 01/06/11 at 16:31:29, Janzert wrote:
There is no new FTE code. That's still doublep's branch-and-bound algorithm. The code that scales up to allow the larger tournaments was always Swiss pairing code not guaranteed to find a global optimum. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by megamau on Jan 7th, 2011, 7:48am Scheduling request To Chessandgo: Would you have problem to move our game from Saturday 5 pm ? I have a go tournament on saturday and I realized that I would not be in time in coming back hom at 5. I would prefer Sunday or Saturday at a later hour (7 ot 8 pm) or even today if you read this in time. If it is not possible for you no problem, I will skip the last turn of the go tournament. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by ocmiente on Jan 7th, 2011, 12:00pm on 01/06/11 at 08:25:43, Fritzlein wrote:
I don't necessarily agree that an optimal pairing algorithm has to take exponential running time. However, I'm thinking that generally this whole discussion about optimal pairings is not based on any established measures of what makes a tournament pairing good. If we have some, then please let me know. I am very interested to see what they are. This is what I think would be a good measure of the 'goodness' of a tournament pairing system. It has to do with the fact that the player rating going into the tournament is not his actual, or 'true' rating - and that that 'true' rating can never really be known. If we did know a players 'true' rating, then there would be no need for a tournament. We would just call the player with the highest rating the champ, knowing that that player is the best. For the sake of obtaining a tournament goodness measure, we can stipulate that we do know the 'true' rating of players. Then we can begin with a data set that has the usual ratings, and also assign to each player a 'true' rating that the pairing algorithm never sees. The 'true' rating would be used in all game simulations to determine the winner of the matches, and the other, visible to everyone, normal rating would be used by the pairing algorithm. After the tournament is fully simulated, the goodness of the pairing algorithm can be measured by seeing how often the player with the highest 'true' rating wins the tournament, etc. In this way, we could compare different tournament pairing algorithms in an unbiased fashion. [Edit] and one other tournament goodness measuring idea. At the beginning of the tournament assign the player with the highest 'true' rating one loss. See how often that player wins the tournament then. This would measure some 'recoverability' factor. Of course, maybe the point of the tournament isn't to find the best player but to have the most exciting set of games. Then the measure would be quite different - like minimizing the square of the sum of the ratings differences between matched players each round, avoiding rematches within groups of players with equal numbers of losses whenever possible. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Janzert on Jan 7th, 2011, 7:28pm Ocmiente, see the tournament simulation software Omar linked to above. Running various tournament formats with differing apparent and true ratings is exactly what it does. Janzert |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by chessandgo on Jan 8th, 2011, 3:41am on 01/07/11 at 07:48:24, megamau wrote:
Sorry, I've just seen your PM and this message. I'm fine with playing at the times you suggest. Let's say tomorrow at 8pm (CET) for example, ie slot 92. Would that be ok if we change the game time at such short notice? Jean |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by megamau on Jan 8th, 2011, 6:36am ok. Tomorrow at 8 is petfect. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by RonWeasley on Jan 8th, 2011, 8:11am on 01/08/11 at 06:36:54, megamau wrote:
Game time change request approved. TD |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by RonWeasley on Jan 8th, 2011, 8:24am All, I'm using a "3g rule" for connection dropouts. It's not in the tournament rules, but we've used it in years past and it came up in the ChrisB-Fritzlein game. If a player's connection drops out before move 3g has been sent, causing the other player to win on time, I'm allowing the winning player to choose either to accept the win or to restart the game completely. This allows players to accept a technical win according to the rules. It also allows the winner the opportunity to play the full game he was preparing for. In the past, players seem to like this option. I will be using the "3g rule" throughout the tournament. TD |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by qswanger on Jan 9th, 2011, 10:36pm I waited until almost the last minute before saying something here because I was trying to see if there was any way I could accommodate the Mon 5:00 pm game time that somehow got determined for me, but I simply cannot get away with it. :-( I followed the recommended strategy of what to do if you could not come up with 60 game times by listing the remaining number of times left as the least preferred times for me. The times I listed as 5th choice I was essentially treating as random since all of the times I was not able to play with any preference higher than the lowest were equally unplayable for me because of my work and child custody schedule. I don't know what can be done now, but I am simply not able to play Monday at 5:00pm EST as I will still be at work. How did this time get selected? I'm sure I selected at least 20 times where I was at least able to play for a few hours, no matter how inconvenient for me (i.e., some were even 1:00 AM on the weekend ... I'd be blurry eyed, but still available if needed). |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Tuks on Jan 10th, 2011, 1:48am maybe you should recommend a time then... because i can't really guess when you can play, :) , im free 8 hours before our time maybe even three hours after, and on tuesday i am completely free, so pick say three times so i can have some choice. I do have an exam for three hours in an hours time so i won't get back to you until 4:30 minutes from this post time. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Tuks on Jan 10th, 2011, 1:50am i'm thinking 2 hours later would be fine for you, or do you work late? its 10 p.m my time, currently (i'm 5 hours ahead of you...) but i can go to bed later |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by qswanger on Jan 10th, 2011, 8:45am Well, Fritzlein responded with some suggestions and opinions about my scheduling issue and scheduling difficulties in general and I was about to quote him in my reply, but the post must have been deleted or something. Anyway, since Tuesday apparently will conflict with the next round and since I cannot play at the Mon 5:00pm EST time-slot (the last one available in the scheduler?) and since I also cannot play past that today apparently for the same reason then I guess I will take a bye or a forfeit or whatever the rules state must happen. Unfortunate. I'm at work now until the rest of the day so probably I will not be able to monitor the board for another response today but instead will wait and see if I get any better luck out of that scheduler for the next round. Thank you. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Tuks on Jan 10th, 2011, 9:22am sorry it didn't work out, make sure you address you're game time as soon as there is a problem, many of us are willing to wake up in the middle of the night if we have to to play, but i won't schedule it if can avoid it ;) |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 10th, 2011, 10:22am on 01/10/11 at 08:45:17, qswanger wrote:
Sorry, I deleted my post because I thought it sounded unsympathetic in light of my having just been spared a loss due to the generosity of my opponent and due to a lenient ruling by RonWeasley. I do think I would have been willing to take my timeout loss in good grace (and indeed I didn't think I would get a chance to replay it, and I was OK with that), but still where does recent history leave me to argue against bending the rules in this case to allow a time outside the scheduler? I'm sorry the scheduler picked an unplayable time for you this round. It really does stink. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by aaaa on Jan 10th, 2011, 2:34pm As a tip to anyone who will ever have to face a shortage of time slots to pick from, the way the algorithm works, one's chances of getting a favorable time slot will improve not only from assigning an as low as possible preferential level to every impossible time slot that is picked, but also from maximizing the preferential levels of those time slots that are possible. So here, if you've gotten less than 60 available time slots, best is to use only 1's (possible) and (obviously as few as possible) 5's (impossible). This will of course forgo any luxury of the algorithm preferring a better time slot amongst the possible ones, but as the saying goes, beggars can't be choosers. Picking as few impossible time slots as possible is obviously best, so as to the question of which, one could pick the impossible time slots amongst those that are the furthest away from the middle of the weekend (by GMT reckoning), which is effectively practically the same as picking the earliest ones. As a bonus that would also increase the chances of being able to reschedule a game before the deadline. Another more dubious, manipulative course of action would be to find out anything about the prospective opponent that could give a hint as to which time slots would be as unlikely as possible for that player and pick those as dummy time slots oneself. I realize that this all might provoke "forfeiture fights" in the future, but it's meant only as a last resort for the desperate and I think that the effects of these "tactics" are to a certain extent an automation of the types of schedule renegotiations that we have grown accustom to here. Conversely, if one is able to leisurely pick more time slots than is required, being courteous and not tactical would entail doing so. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Heyckie on Jan 11th, 2011, 2:28am When should I have submitted a form about suitable game times? Thought it was before 7pm EST Tuesday. Can't play Monday 11.00 pm. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 11th, 2011, 8:44am You should enter your preferred times before 8pm EST Monday. If the scheduled time is not good you should contact your opponent and discuss a suitable time and update your preferred times to make the agreed time the highest rated and everything else lower than that. The scheduler will be run again at 8pm EST on Tuesday to set the final times. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 11th, 2011, 9:34am Omar, would you be so good as to make http://arimaa.com/arimaa/wc/2011/ link to http://arimaa.com/arimaa/wc/2011/showGames.cgi and http://arimaa.com/arimaa/mwiki/index.php/2011_World_Championship ? Thanks in advance! |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 11th, 2011, 9:39am on 01/11/11 at 02:28:13, Heyckie wrote:
According to the rules, you can't change your time preferences without permission from Belteshazzar. You should definitely contact him immediately. In this case, however, I would recommend changing your times unilaterally even if you don't get a quick response from Belteshazzar, because he might be amenable to a change given your circumstances even if he isn't responding instantly to e-mail. The worst that can happen is that he can insist on the original time, as he has a right to do anyway even if you wait for a response. Of course it is open to abuse if people who didn't forget to change their times nevertheless claim that they forgot to change their times as a negotiating ploy, but given that we got a "set your times" warning message before the first round, I can understand if folks thought they would get a "set your times" warning message before every round. I personally will be more and more likely to be hard-nosed about insisting on the scheduler time as the tournament progresses, particularly in the finals. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 11th, 2011, 10:43am Thanks for the reminder, Karl. I added the links. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by The_Jeh on Jan 11th, 2011, 12:34pm on 01/11/11 at 09:39:41, Fritzlein wrote:
I think the confusion might have arisen not because we weren't sent a warning per se, but because the link to the scheduler itself was to be found in an old e-mail. Or is there a general link somewhere? |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by jdb on Jan 11th, 2011, 6:02pm on 01/11/11 at 12:34:01, The_Jeh wrote:
I still have no idea how to find the scheduler from the arimaa website. Hanzack, we can talk about another time to play the game. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 11th, 2011, 7:35pm on 01/11/11 at 18:02:48, jdb wrote:
Jeff, the link to the scheduler is in the email: Quote:
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 11th, 2011, 9:31pm on 01/11/11 at 10:43:42, omar wrote:
Thanks, Omar. It is convenient to have those pages two clicks away from the game room. on 01/11/11 at 19:35:05, omar wrote:
Still, it might be convenient if the scheduling link were also available from the main World Championship tournament page. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 11th, 2011, 11:07pm OK, I added a link to 'Select Times' on the WC page. If anyone ended up with a bad time due to not knowing where to enter your times, I'll consider it a tournament coordinator error and accept changing the time to something worked out with your opponent. But please do this ASAP and post the new time here in terms of how many days/hours to shift forward or back. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Heyckie on Jan 12th, 2011, 4:06am Sorry for being too late submitting my time slot form and a big Thank You to Omar for rescheduling my game, hope the new time really is convenient for Belteshazzar too. I'll make sure to fill the form on time from now on. I have a son turning 2 months this week, so my possible, let alone preferred, game times change pretty much every week. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by ocmiente on Jan 12th, 2011, 5:04am on 01/07/11 at 19:28:12, Janzert wrote:
Thanks very much for the link to the code. I downloaded it and managed to make my C# code work with it. Here are the results for a 16 person triple elimination tournament: Code:
It took a while to run this (a few hours) because the framework relaunches my application for each tournament round. If there is some kind of plug-in option that lets the scheduler avoid this app startup time, please let me know. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Janzert on Jan 12th, 2011, 9:04am on 01/12/11 at 05:04:43, ocmiente wrote:
Does the C# runtime really take an appreciable part of a minute to start? I would tend to suspect that your pairing code is actually taking the majority of that time. For comparison my FTE code written in python* takes less than a minute and a half for the same run. Code:
Janzert * certainly not known for its speed although the startup time is probably not too bad |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by ocmiente on Jan 12th, 2011, 10:12am on 01/12/11 at 09:04:09, Janzert wrote:
Fairly certain. I can run an entire tournament in process in much less than a second. I see there is a Java format there, does anyone know if that has similar issues? I suspect the easy answer is to port it to C++, or maybe create a webservice. [Edit] I found the problem. One should almost never write code when sick. Hopefully, I'll snap out of it before my game Sunday :) |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 12th, 2011, 11:24pm I usually run about 2000 tournaments to get somewhat stable values. Otherwise the values can fluctuate quite a bit. Also if the format makes use of initial seedings then it's good to test it with a rating inaccuracy of 200 (instead of the typical 50). See this thread for some results I had posted after comparing various formats: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=events;action=display;num=1249653915;start=75 |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by ginrunner on Jan 13th, 2011, 1:33am b599 and I have both agreed to move our game time to 3PM Monday Arizona time. If needed I can forward the emails to whomever necessary. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 13th, 2011, 10:00am on 01/13/11 at 01:33:47, ginrunner wrote:
I've changed the game time. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by ocmiente on Jan 13th, 2011, 3:42pm on 01/12/11 at 23:24:03, omar wrote:
I went ahead and ran the simulations for my code using the same parameters you recommended. The results appear to be consistent with the other triple elimination tournament formats. It took 1 hour, 34 minutes to run 2000 tournament simulations on a fairly fast machine. Code:
I was also curious to know how this might work with something similar to our current championship and got the following: Code:
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by aaaa on Jan 13th, 2011, 4:53pm How do people currently feel about the only partial banking of time? To me, it makes the time reserve of a player at a given moment somewhat arbitrary and unfair. I would like to see it become 100% again, not penalizing any player for any kind of time management, flexible or not, and only rely on the maximum move time limit not to bore any spectators. Too bad this forum doesn't appear to support polls. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Adanac on Jan 13th, 2011, 7:29pm on 01/13/11 at 16:53:35, aaaa wrote:
I understand the rationale of making games spectator-friendly but I do sometimes wish we had more control over how to manage our time in a game. When there's a really critical move to be made in the WC, the maximum time is 4 or 5 minutes per move regardless of how much time has been banked. If I need to go over 5 minutes of thinking time for a single move, then it's probably a difficult decision in a complex position that can make or break the game -- I'd rather have the extra time and let the spectators wait and watch. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by ginrunner on Jan 14th, 2011, 1:41am 4 or 5 minutes for a move should be enough time though honestly. The majority of moves are made in less than a minute and so 5 times that should be enough. Yes, there are those times where you have a complex situation and you would use up the whole time but would an extra minute or more really give you enough time to actually change your mind? I know personally on those really complex moves I tend to see a move then try to figure out what is wrong with it. If there is something wrong I think of something new. I really doubt at minute 5 you would not already have something planned and been over it and its possible lines. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Adanac on Jan 14th, 2011, 11:06am on 01/14/11 at 01:41:39, ginrunner wrote:
Chess players have been known to study a single move for over 1 hour in extreme cases, even when they only have a total of 2 hours available for the first 40 moves! I'm not saying that I would often look at a position for more than 5 minutes, but it would be nice to have the option if the position was really complex. And the peace of mind is a psychological bonus too. Once I've already thought for a few minutes and haven't found a move that I really like on a complicated board then I start to get paranoid about the ticking clock. If I've played quickly the whole game to build up my reserve time, it would be nice to be able to just sit back and really think through all the options without being rushed. The other issue, that aaaa addressed originally, was about banking only 75% of unused time. That's never bothered me as much because I've always been able to bank a lot of extra time early in the game, despite having only partial credit for unused time. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 14th, 2011, 8:17pm on 01/14/11 at 11:06:08, Adanac wrote:
...which is why watching chess is so frustrating, even when there is live commentary which should be keeping the game interesting. My experience chatting about live grandmaster games on ICC was typically the following: In the opening, no one has any time to explain what is going on, so we get about fifteen moves into the game with no sense of what might have happened instead, and no sense of what the struggle was about. Then the game screeches to a halt for twenty minutes while the guy who was taken out of book tries to figure out if he is in trouble or not. During this long think, people talk about the position for a few minutes, then have exhausted what they want to say and start rambling about other topics of general interest. I leave and get sandwich. At the second long think I go read the newspaper, and often forget to come back to the game at all. For my enjoyment of Arimaa as a spectator, a commentator, and even for my enjoyment in playing against someone who manages his time unevenly, I am quite willing to give up my own privilege of having long thinks as an Arimaa player. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 16th, 2011, 1:16am on 01/13/11 at 19:29:54, Adanac wrote:
I hope the Arimaa community does not follow Chess in this regards. What's good for the players is not always good for the spectators. Arimaa players and organizers must remember to keep the needs of the spectators in mind. Spectators have no voice in meetings where matters such as time controls are decided, but they do eventually vote with their wallets and feet. Without happy fans and spectators a sport is not sustainable; and it's the players who eventually lose out. Also, I've always felt that players should think of the time controls as an extension of the game rules since it applies to both players equally. Of course different players will be better at different time controls. No matter what time control is picked for the event some player will come out winning. One can argue that slower time controls with greater flexibility for the player will allow higher quality games with less chances of losses due to time or blunders and I definitely agree with that. The time controls in WC type events should provide sufficient time for the players to think. However, it would be a mistake to think that spectators only want high quality games. The possibility that the players could make a mistake makes the game more interesting to watch. Not that all this really matters that much right now, but maybe someday it will. It would be good if we just did it right from the beginning. So lets not disregard the needs of the spectators. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by rbarreira on Jan 16th, 2011, 1:41pm A compromise would be to have a fairly low reserve limit, but stop using a limit for each move. This way the total game time does not increase in any significant way, but a difficult move can be thought on for a bit longer. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 17th, 2011, 7:50pm The round 2 games are over and I am about to pair the players for round 3. However, we have come across an issue which required the decision of the TD. In round 1 Labadorboy forfeited the game against Nevermind and did not come back to request to continue the tournament. Thus, he has been dropped from the tournament and did not play in round 2. When computing the Strength of Schedule for Nevermind after round 2 we need to decide what the contribution from Labadorboy will be from his performance in round 2. If we treat Labadorboy's absence as a lose then Nevermind would have a lower SoS than if we treat Labadorboy's absence as a draw. This difference in SoS would cause a difference in the pairing. The tournament rules should have addressed how forfeits (drop outs) would effect the SoS calculations explicitly. However, we have never had this issue come up in previous years and so we had not thought of mentioning it in the rules. Due to the urgency of the decision, I called the TD and asked for his decision on the matter. The TD decided that we should assume a draw for Labadorboy's performance in round 2 and future rounds. So I will pair round 3 based on this decision. I will leave it up to the TD to explain the justification for his decision if he wishes to do so. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by 99of9 on Jan 17th, 2011, 9:26pm I just found out that I need to speak in defense of having the preliminary structure we have at the moment. I think the preliminary is great, and am strongly against dropping it. A unified elimination tournament means you have to treat every game extremely seriously, which is difficult to sustain for many rounds. I like the fact that preliminary losses get wiped when the serious action starts. For example, if Fritz's timeout in round one had counted, would you really want to see that dragging him down if it comes down to a head to head shootout with Jean? P.S. A nice side benefit is that weaker players still get plenty of competition experience without an early knockout. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 17th, 2011, 11:30pm on 01/17/11 at 21:26:22, 99of9 wrote:
I wouldn't mind each round being serious. Indeed, it seems odd to me that victories in the preliminaries count for less than victories in the finals. The player who becomes World Champion could have a worse total record (preliminaries and finals combined) than the second-place finisher, including a worse head-to-head. But the worst part of the preliminary rounds counting less is, as I mentioned before, the possibility that someone could gain strategically by intentionally losing a preliminary game in order to insure a better position in the final. Last year three people potentially had this motive in the last round of the preliminaries. That's an ugly artifact of clearing out losses between the two. on 01/17/11 at 19:50:20, omar wrote:
Nevermind's tournament fate may ride on this technicality. If he finishes 4-2, the extra SoS from treating Labradorboy as a 2.5 win player rather than a 0-win player could mean that Nevermind is in rather than out. Maybe that doesn't bother you, 99of9, but it sure bugs the heck out of Nombril! ;D |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Sconibulus on Jan 17th, 2011, 11:50pm Hmm, if we like both having prelims, and making SoS less important, perhaps the finals could be between all players who have at least as many wins as the eighth ranked player. This might not entirely eliminate the tactical viability of throwing a game, but it would probably reduce it, as you'd be limited to altering first-round pairings, rather than getting a player you consider dangerous eliminated from the tournament. The exception to this might be with certain rare scenarios where one can boost 8th's score by an entire win, in which case, it would become even more tempting. This being said, I'm much more in favour of the one-tournament solution. It's simple, straightforward, and while it doesn't provide a lot of opportunity for the newer players to have fun, there seem to be a lot more events running throughout the year than in previous years, so it doesn't really need to be too terribly newbie-friendly. It is the World Championship after all. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Nombril on Jan 17th, 2011, 11:55pm on 01/17/11 at 23:30:47, Fritzlein wrote:
;D I suppose SoS is a necessary evil for providing seeds and scheduling rounds, but with so few rounds it seems too arbitrary to be deciding who gets to continue on in the tournament. But I do agree with 99of9 that the Preliminary / Final break in the structure has strong appeal. I did float the idea of having a 1 game playoff to determine the final 8 in cases where there is a grouping of players tied for the last spot(s), but A) I don't know if it is mathematically proven that 1 game is enough to make that final distinction, B) Omar resists anything that lengthens the schedule, and C) Noone else seemed interested. If the potential to throw the last game in the preliminary round to get a better pairing is a serious issue, why not consider random pairings for the double elimination portion? |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Nevermind on Jan 18th, 2011, 3:55am Quote:
I disagree. Though there has been an increasing number of events in which all players can participate and have fun, few have really been as comprehensive and been taken as seriously as the WC. Last year's WC was the first one I participated in, and I learned more from the 5 games that I played in that tournament than I did the last 200 games I played in the gameroom. I think it would be a great shame if newbie and average players such as myself would not be able to experience the tournament as much as they can currently. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Nevermind on Jan 18th, 2011, 4:00am Also let me just clarify that part of both the learning experience and the community experience that I valued so highly in the WC were the audio commentaries, written highlights and so forth that were provided. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Nombril on Jan 18th, 2011, 8:56am on 01/17/11 at 23:50:52, Sconibulus wrote:
I like that idea - it is actually what my impression was after reading the rules for the first time last year. The 'format' section includes a chart about how many rounds will be played in the preliminary, along with a column for "# of wins needed". I had assumed if you made that threshold for number of wins, then you made the tournament. (Of course, it does state 'select the top 8 performers' just above that, but I think I was just skimming...) |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 18th, 2011, 9:09am on 01/13/11 at 16:53:35, aaaa wrote:
I think the server did not have support for the maximum time per move parameter (T) when we were deciding on the time control for the WC. There is a thread where Karl explained his reasoning for the time control that we currently use. We might need to look over that again and see how the T parameter effects it. Here is that thread: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=talk;action=display;num=1133477904 |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 18th, 2011, 10:13am I just want to give a big shout out to Omar for his tireless efforts during the tournament so far. You're doing a great job, Omar. I'm having a wonderful time, and I know I'm not the only one. Thank you! |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Hippo on Jan 18th, 2011, 11:03am @Forfeit case: if I understand it well, SoS describes how difficult opponent was the player fighting. I am not sure in the case there was not fight at all the stength of the opponent was 2.5 wins in turnament ... . It seems to me it is much better comparable with bye. I agree it's a pitty. More interesting case would be forfeight in 3rd round of player with 1 win ... how it should affect the SOS of the 3 opponents? |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Adanac on Jan 18th, 2011, 12:57pm on 01/18/11 at 11:03:50, Hippo wrote:
As I understand it right now, all 3 opponents would receive credit for a 1-win opponent regardless of whether they had to fight to win or just received credit for a forefeit victory. I'm OK with that system because it's simple and doesn't discredit a player for winning by forfeit (it's beyond his control). I do agree that it's a bit generous to award Nevermind with a 2.5-win opponent when he was matched up with a first-round opponent who likely would have finished with only 1 or 2 wins. But, oh well, hopefully that doesn't become a deciding factor in the final standings and I hope even more that there are no further withdrawals, which would be an even bigger headache at the later stages of the tournament. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Nevermind on Jan 18th, 2011, 3:37pm Let me reiterate that I have personally expressed no opinion about what should be done in my case with regards to the forfeiting opponent. I do agree that the decision made is generous towards me. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Adanac on Jan 18th, 2011, 5:13pm on 01/18/11 at 15:37:53, Nevermind wrote:
Although it's a generous decision, ultimately it's unlikely to make much difference. Whether an opponent has 2 or 2.5 wins has little impact on a 4-2 player due to the high F factor in the Strength of Schedule formula. I wouldn't worry about it too much: if you advance to the finals it will be thanks to your hot start and it's extremely unlikely that this decision will be the deciding factor ;) |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Sconibulus on Jan 19th, 2011, 12:49am Could I request a delay for my round 3 game of 19 hours, moving it to 15:00 EST, Sunday the 23rd. I sent a message requesting a change to The_Jeh, and that's the time he chose, The_Jeh, can you confirm this? Thanks to everyone involved, it was my own fault, I was dumb and misread a schedule : () ) |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by RonWeasley on Jan 19th, 2011, 8:25am on 01/18/11 at 15:37:53, Nevermind wrote:
Yes, you may have reason to believe the decision was generous. People are welcome to do so. For the record, I assert the decision was neutral. If the same standard were applied to a highly rated forfeiting player, the decision could be interpreted as unfavorable. The forfeiting player was treated as an average player with an average SoS. This is how we will treat any forfieting player this year. The expectation of the success of a particular forfeiting player was not used in this decision because of problems in fairly assessing such an expectation. The goal in applying this standard is to make the expected value of its generosity to be neutral, realizing that it won't be neutral in particular cases, but that proving generosity or otherwise has too many complicating factors at this time. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by The_Jeh on Jan 19th, 2011, 9:04am on 01/19/11 at 00:49:26, Sconibulus wrote:
Yep. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by aaaa on Jan 19th, 2011, 12:20pm What would be wrong with simply having the Swiss tournament be completely unrelated to the actual championship? It would then still provide one with the opportunity of playing some warming-up games as well as trying to improve one's rating in order to get a better seeding. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 19th, 2011, 3:15pm on 01/18/11 at 10:13:55, Fritzlein wrote:
You are quite welcome. I'm glad that you are enjoying the event. On behalf of myself and the Arimaa community a big Thank You for helping out by providing commentary. It really helps to make the event more enjoyable for all of us. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 19th, 2011, 3:18pm on 01/19/11 at 00:49:26, Sconibulus wrote:
The game time has been changed. Please check the time under the Scheduled Games section to make sure this is what you wanted. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 19th, 2011, 3:20pm on 01/19/11 at 12:20:14, aaaa wrote:
Good suggestion. I've been writing up my thoughts on the WC format for next year and should be posting it soon. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Hippo on Jan 21st, 2011, 8:00am Scheduling request To Naveed: I have sent you message with proposals for rescheduling our game. If any of them is OK for you please answer. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by ocmiente on Jan 21st, 2011, 2:57pm This is to request a reschedule of 722caasi vs. ocmiente, which is currently scheduled for Sunday, 2:00am GMT. I would like to change this to Saturday, 10:00pm GMT (2:00pm Pacific Time). I have emailed Isaac, and will send another email to him to confirm this time in the forum. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by 722caasi on Jan 21st, 2011, 3:24pm This time (2pm PST) works better for me too. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 22nd, 2011, 10:00am on 01/21/11 at 14:57:51, ocmiente wrote:
This game has been changed to the requested time. Sorry I did not see this earlier. Moving games to a later time is safer than moving to an earlier time. If one of the players does not notice that the request was implemented then it could cause an unnecessary forfeit. It is best to workout all time changes during the first 24 hours of the games being scheduled; that way the second run of the scheduler will implement the change. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 24th, 2011, 9:38pm Wow, did the scheduling algorithm change? 6 of 16 games before Saturday... |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Nombril on Jan 25th, 2011, 7:23am To be sure rescheduling requests don't get lost in the shuffle on this general thread, I suggest we put them in a separate place: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=events;action=display;num=1295961712;start=0#0 |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by 722caasi on Jan 30th, 2011, 5:51pm I am sorry for missing my round 4 game. I lost track of time while taking care of my brother, and I would like to play in rounds 5 and 6. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 30th, 2011, 7:44pm Thanks 722caasi; you are in for round 5. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Jan 30th, 2011, 7:45pm When computing the F-factor for a swiss tournament that allows players to drop out or join later, should the players from the current round be used or players from round 1? |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Jan 30th, 2011, 7:53pm For simplicity I recommend that the value from Round 1 should be used for all rounds. It sort of makes sense, too, given that the ghosts of dropped-out players are still getting draws every round. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Hippo on Jan 31st, 2011, 10:34am I agree for turnaments when nobody can enter later. In turnaments where participation is somehhow floating the other choice would be better. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Adanac on Feb 1st, 2011, 7:22am Omar, did the pairings get altered sometime between Sunday night and Monday afternoon? I'm now seeing about 8 inconsistencies between the Wiki and the Gameroom. It's mostly gold/silver assignments that are different but I'm also seeing some new pairings. For example, the Wiki shows the original pairings (based upon current rank): #23 naveed vs. #27 beancrisp #24 ginrunner vs. #28 oali #25 722cassi vs. #29 Belteshazzar Now the Gameroom is showing: #23 naveed vs. #30 b599 #24 ginrunner vs. #27 beancrisp #25 722cassi vs. #28 oali etc. The original pairing made more sense to me than the 2nd one. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Feb 1st, 2011, 10:49am on 01/30/11 at 19:53:59, Fritzlein wrote:
Maybe I should have two versions of this Swiss based on whether players can join later or not. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Feb 1st, 2011, 11:29am on 02/01/11 at 07:22:51, Adanac wrote:
Greg, I ran the pairing again after changing the SoS to be computed using the players in the first round. I think that's when some of the pairings changed from what they were before. I thought we had the same F-factor now, so I'm not sure why the pairing changed. We still seem to have different SoS numbers going into round 5: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/events/showGames.cgi?e=2011wc The pairing algorithm does not assign the colors. After the pairing is done, another program does the color assignment. In pairs where it cannot decide, it randomly assigns the colors, so that caused the color assignments to change when I ran the pairing program again. I have already done the scheduling and emailed the players their opponents and game times. If it is critical I can cancel the games this week, try to get the difference sorted out and move round 5 to next week. Let me know ASAP if you think we should do this. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Adanac on Feb 1st, 2011, 11:54am on 02/01/11 at 11:29:53, omar wrote:
Omar, I think everything is OK. It seems that the new formula has moved naveed below ginrunner and that is why the pairings are different. I think we should keep the pairings the way they are in the gameroom and I'll redo the Wiki tonight. Our SoS calculations seem to be consistent it's just the presentation that is different. Your table takes the SoS at the End of Round 4 and uses it in Round 5. If you compare your Round 5 the Wiki Round 4 SoS, they match: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/mwiki/index.php/2011_Open_Classic_Round_4 My Round 5 SoS has already added in the strength of the round 5 opponent, which is no big deal because the pairings have already been created. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Feb 1st, 2011, 6:19pm Great. We can move forward with round 5 then. Glad to see that our SoS are matching. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Adanac on Feb 2nd, 2011, 8:09am on 02/01/11 at 18:19:10, omar wrote:
I finally figured out the final mystery. It's obvious in retrospect, but because I thought it was due to my error I looked for a non-existent mistake it took a bit longer to figure it out. Some F-factor values had Naveed ahead of Ginrunner and 722caasi and other ones have Naveed behind both of them. After 4 rounds Naveed's opponents had this many wins: 4-0-3-2 After 4 rounds both ginrunner's and 722caasi's opponents had this many wins: 2-1-2-2 Even though Naveed's opponents had 9 total wins, the new formula gave him a lower SoS after 4 rounds than ginrunner & 722caasi. This is why the pairings for 1-3 players changed. It's all correct and it matches both Omar's calculations and my own. The strange thing is that when I posted the Round 5 standings it switched the order back to the original schedule, with Naveed ahead of ginrunner & 722caasi. I thought I made a mistake somewhere but it's just that the opponent win totals are now: Naveed 4-0-3-2-1 GR/722: 2-1-2-2-1 Even though there haven't yet been any changes in the number of opponent wins, updating the round from 4 to 5 has altered the relative values of each round's opponent and now Naveed is back in front. So my first instinct was to expect the original pairings whereas Omar was correct to use the ones in the gameroom. If that makes sense. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 2nd, 2011, 9:40am on 02/02/11 at 08:09:25, Adanac wrote:
Thanks for explaining. It looks like the new SoS is behaving as intended. Although the old SoS would see nine opponent wins versus seven opponent wins, the new SoS sees that naveed played three stronger and one weaker opponent, whereas ginrunner and 722caasi have each played three stronger and one equal opponent. So the new SoS sees that one win and three losses is just what is expected from naveed, but one win and three losses is better than expected from ginrunner and 722caasi, so the latter are higher in the standings. Quote:
It matters most how many stronger, weaker, and equal opponents one has had, but there is still some balance with how much stronger or weaker the opponents were. The formula (correctly) thinks that the difference between a 2-3 player and a 1-4 player is less than the difference between a 2-2 player and a 1-3 player. So changing the round number from 4 to 5 suddenly gives ginrunner and 722caasi less credit for their three stronger opponents, since it thinks those opponents weren't as much stronger. It is enough to shift them behind naveed in the standings. But omar is correct to make the pairings while the round number is still 4, because the opponents are really 2-2 and 1-3, not yet 2-3 and 1-4. Indirectly we have discovered the limits of the sensitivity to the F-factor, because changing N from 4 to 5 (which is equivalent to multiplying F by 5/6) changed the order of players. I am still left with a mystery, though. Omar has the standings at the end of Round 4 being ginrunner 2, 3.037, 1790 722caasi 2, 3.037, 1596 naveed 2, 2.962, 1778 qswanger 2, 2.814, 1797 beancrisp 2, 2.814, 1690 oali 2, 2.814, 1626 b599 2, 2.692, 1480 Belteshazzar 2, 2.692, 1597 whereas you have the standings as being ginrunner 1790 [22] 3.0374 722caasi 1596 [28] 3.0374 naveed 1778 [23] 2.9618 qswanger 1797 [21] 2.8136 beancrisp 1690 [25] 2.8136 oali 1626 [26] 2.8136 Belteshazzar 1597 [27] 2.6916 b599 1480 [30] 2.6916 Note that the two of you have Belteshazzar and b599 flipped. To me it appears that omar's standings are wrong. Belteshazzar and b599 have the same record and the same SoS, so we go to the next tiebreaker, which is seed, a.k.a. pre-tournament rating. Belteshazzar has the higher pre-tournament rating, and therefore should be higher in the standings. In consequence of which, the pairings of b599 vs. naveed qswanger vs. Belteshazzar which were made this round should actually be Belteshazzar vs. naveed qswanger vs. b599 I think we need a ruling from RonWeasley here. On the one hand, the games have already been paired and scheduled, so re-pairing and re-scheduling represents a disruption. Also it's not a big deal since 1-1 players got paired against each other. On the other hand, the rules are the rules, and it appears the currently listed pairings are incorrect according to the rules. On further inspection, I can guess that the source of the mis-ordering is rounding error. Belteshazzar and b599 have the same opponent strengths except that Belteshazzar has a 2-2 and a 0-4 opponent in the place of b599 having two 1-3 opponents. For a 1-3 player, each of these combos is average, and each pair of opponents should contribute 1.00000000 to the strength of schedule. However, Belteshazzar might have only gotten credit for 0.99999999, and thus slipped a notch in the standings. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by RonWeasley on Feb 2nd, 2011, 11:35am Right now I'm going to accept the rounding error theory and leave the pairings as is. I don't want to have to discover and correct for rounding errors several times in a round, so I'm choosing expediency this time. This means for the rest of the tournament I will accept the automated pairings if we still believe all unexpected pairings can be explained by rounding error. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 2nd, 2011, 11:50am on 02/02/11 at 11:35:04, RonWeasley wrote:
That's reasonable for this round, but if Omar is able to discover and fix a rounding error, you would like him to do so prior to pairing Round 6 and prior to determining the final top eight players, right? |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Adanac on Feb 2nd, 2011, 12:46pm on 02/02/11 at 11:35:04, RonWeasley wrote:
I like this ruling for round 5. We got really lucky in that this rounding error has virtually no chance whatsoever of affecting who qualifies for the top 8, or in which order. But if there's a rounding error in round 6 (or heaven forbid, at the end of the tournament) we might not be so lucky. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by RonWeasley on Feb 2nd, 2011, 3:39pm on 02/02/11 at 11:50:52, Fritzlein wrote:
Yes, if we can make it better, we should. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by RonWeasley on Feb 2nd, 2011, 3:51pm on 02/02/11 at 12:46:49, Adanac wrote:
This is a good point. Rounding error, if not identified and corrected before the next pairings, is tolerable in my view. It is a random process (doesn't favor a certain kind of player) and the error doesn't cause a lot of divergence. The final standings is different and we should double check that they're correct. For the final standings, there's more time to do this without disrupting people's schedules. The mathematically correct standings will take precedence over the automated standings. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by aaaa on Feb 3rd, 2011, 9:41am I think I can fix the rounding error problem in the script, but I would need to know its interface, i.e. what parameters to supply to it and, for which these are file names, the respective formats. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Feb 5th, 2011, 2:21pm I am only display 3 digits after the decimal, but the sorting is using the full number. So the change in player order was due to some very low significant digit of SoS being higher for b599 than for Belteshazzar. I'll change the algorithm to round the SoS to 4 digits after the decimal and use that for sorting as well as displaying. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 6th, 2011, 4:49pm on 02/05/11 at 14:21:34, omar wrote:
Yay! The latest standings don't have any reversals like b599/Belteshazzar at the end of last round. Unfortunately, there is another potential issue with the pairing algorithm. I would like RonWeasley's ruling on whether to use the (IMO inferior) pairing produced by the software, or instead a slightly variant of that algorithm that both Adanac and I were expecting from our experience with Swiss-paired chess tournaments. We all agree on how to pair the top six players. Then it comes to the 3-2 players: 7 hanzack 8 99of9 9 Nevermind 10 The_Jeh 11 Hippo 12 jdb 13 omar 14 woh 15 Sconibulus 16 ArifSyed The "sliding pairing" used by Swiss systems is 7 hanzack 12 jdb 8 99of9 13 omar 9 Nevermind 14 woh 10 The_Jeh 15 Sconibulus 11 Hippo 16 ArifSyed Unfortunately, this pairing can't happen because hanzack has already played jdb and Nevermind has already played woh. A human TD might see that both problems can be solved with minimal disruption by swapping woh with jdb, and call that a good pairing, but let's see what the algorithm does. It tries to pair hanzack with jdb and rejects it as a repeat. Then it tries to pair hanzack with omar, and rejects that as a repeat too. Then it happily pair hanzack with woh. So far so good. 7 hanzack 14 woh Here's where the trouble starts. Both Adanac and I would expect the algorithm to next try to pair 99of9 with jdb, and work on down through the bottom half of the 3-2 players in order, until finding a suitable match. Omar's algorithm, however, skips jdb, and first tries to pair 99of9 with omar, yeilding 7 hanzack 14 woh 8 99of9 13 omar Then it tries to pair Nevermind, but again skips jdb and starts with woh, Nevermind's "ideal" opponent. Since woh is already paired, it drops down and pairs Nevermind with Sconibulus. Proceeding in this fashion yields 7 hanzack 14 woh 8 99of9 13 omar 9 Nevermind 15 Sconibulus 10 The_Jeh 16 ArifSyed 11 Hippo 12 jdb in which jdb is only paired at the end when all the 3-2 players have run out. Comparing this to straight sliding pairing, it doesn't look like we are off too much, except that Hippo has to play a far stonger opponent than he was supposed to. Everybody else got off by one or two seeds from expected opponent strength, but Hippo and jdb got thrown off by four seeds. Meanwhile, it would be perfectly straightforward for the algorithm to not forget about jdb until the end, but instead keep trying to pair him until it succeeds. This would result in pairings of 7 hanzack 14 woh 8 99of9 13 omar 9 Nevermind 12 jdb 10 The_Jeh 15 Sconibulus 11 Hippo 16 ArifSyed The latter pairing is clearly more in line with Swiss sliding pairing. It happens to be exactly what a human TD would have done, but it doesn't require application of human judgment; it only requires rigid application of a less-dumb algorithm. This scrambling of pairings is an unnecessarily large deviation sliding pairing, but it isn't a huge deal, and I wouldn't make a fuss about it if not for the fact that it makes an even greater hash out of the bottom of the pairings. The standings are: 17 megamau 18 Harren 19 ocmiente 20 knarl 21 Heyckie 22 722caasi 23 ChrisB 24 qswanger 25 ginrunner 26 naveed 27 Rad 28 beancrisp 29 b599 30 oali 31 Belteshazzar 32 ddyer The gaps indicate the score groups 2-3, 1-4, and 0-5. There are an odd number of 2-3 players, so Swiss pairing dictates that the bottom 2-3 player should be paired with the top 1-4 player, and similarly the bottom 1-4 player with the 0-5. We can't have everyone play an opponent with the same record, but that's the closest we can come. Thus the "ideal" Swiss pairings are 17 megamau 22 722caasi 18 Harren 23 ChrisB 19 ocmiente 24 qswanger 20 knarl 25 ginrunner 21 Heyckie 26 naveed 27 Rad 28 beancrisp 29 b599 30 oali 31 Belteshazzar 32 ddyer Alas, Harren vs. ChrisB, Rad vs. beancrisp, and Belteshazzar vs. ddyer are all repeats. What a human TD would do is up for debate, as there is more than one reasonable solution, but the algorithm in use by the tournament settles on an unreasonable solution. Just as it did in forgetting jdb until the end of the 3-2 players, the algorithm rejects Harren vs. ChrisB and then forgets ChrisB until all the other 2-3 players have been paired! So the 2-3 player who drops down to a 1-4 opponent is not the bottom 2-3 player or close to the bottom 2-3 player; it is the one-below-middle 2-3 player ChrisB. The algorithm's final pairings are 17 megamau 22 722caasi 18 Harren 24 qswanger 19 ocmiente 25 ginrunner 20 knarl 26 naveed 21 Heyckie 27 Rad 23 ChrisB 30 oali 28 beancrisp 31 Belteshazzar 29 b599 32 ddyer As before, most players are only off a couple from the expect strength of opponent, except that there was a huge swing for ChrisB and oali, the 1-4 player forced to face him. This is even more out of whack than the jdb-Hippo situation, because of the way it crosses score boundaries. Rather than give you my human-judgement pairings, I submit that the less-dumb algorithm that doesn't forget about unpaired players in the bottom half of a score group will mechanically do a better job, yeilding 17 megamau 22 722caasi 18 Harren 24 qswanger 19 ocmiente 23 ChrisB 20 knarl 25 ginrunner 21 Heyckie 26 naveed 27 Rad 29 b599 30 oali 31 Belteshazzar 28 beancrisp 32 ddyer (Note that once only four players remain, there is only one possible pairing to avoid giving ddyer a repeat opponent.) This algorithmic pairing also deviates from the ideal Swiss, but its deviations are less glaring than the actual pairings I feel that the principles of Swiss pairing have been violated enough to warrant replacing the algorithm-generated pairings of 1 Fritzlein 3 chessandgo 2 rabbits 4 Tuks 5 Adanac 6 Nombril 7 hanzack 14 woh 8 99of9 13 omar 9 Nevermind 15 Sconibulus 10 The_Jeh 16 ArifSyed 11 Hippo 12 jdb 17 megamau 22 722caasi 18 Harren 24 qswanger 19 ocmiente 25 ginrunner 20 knarl 26 naveed 21 Heyckie 27 Rad 23 ChrisB 30 oali 28 beancrisp 31 Belteshazzar 29 b599 32 ddyer with the slightly-smarter-algorithm-generated pairings of 1 Fritzlein 3 chessandgo 2 rabbits 4 Tuks 5 Adanac 6 Nombril 7 hanzack 14 woh 8 99of9 13 omar 9 Nevermind 12 jdb 10 The_Jeh 15 Sconibulus 11 Hippo 16 ArifSyed 17 megamau 22 722caasi 18 Harren 24 qswanger 19 ocmiente 23 ChrisB 20 knarl 25 ginrunner 21 Heyckie 26 naveed 27 Rad 29 b599 30 oali 31 Belteshazzar 28 beancrisp 32 ddyer On the other hand, expediency may again dictate simply going forward with what the software has already spit out. Ron, I await your ruling. Thanks in advance. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by The_Jeh on Feb 6th, 2011, 5:10pm Fritz, I've already played Sconibulus. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by 99of9 on Feb 6th, 2011, 5:24pm on 02/06/11 at 16:49:26, Fritzlein wrote:
I've already played jdb. So I think the algorithm did the right thing at this stage. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 6th, 2011, 7:16pm on 02/06/11 at 17:10:48, The_Jeh wrote:
Oopsies; that's what I get for trying to do it by hand. Then the pairing I'm proposing should be 1 Fritzlein 3 chessandgo 2 rabbits 4 Tuks 5 Adanac 6 Nombril 7 hanzack 14 woh 8 99of9 13 omar 9 Nevermind 12 jdb 10 The_Jeh 16 ArifSyed 11 Hippo 15 Sconibulus 17 megamau 22 722caasi 18 Harren 24 qswanger 19 ocmiente 23 ChrisB 20 knarl 25 ginrunner 21 Heyckie 26 naveed 27 Rad 29 b599 30 oali 31 Belteshazzar 28 beancrisp 32 ddyer Actually, it isn't a specific pairing I am proposing, so much as an algorithm. It is the algorithm that Adanac and I both thought was the instantiated algorithm. If you look at what Adanac was posting in the chat room just at the time my game with rabbits was beginning, he did it right: Quote:
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 6th, 2011, 7:18pm on 02/06/11 at 17:24:33, 99of9 wrote:
Well, it did the right thing not to pair you with jdb, but it did the wrong thing to not even consider pairing you with jdb. So, yes, it didn't make a difference in the output at that stage, but temporarily forgetting about jdb did change Nevermind's pairing. Note that you are paired with omar according to both algorithms; what goes haywire is who jdb is paired with. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by 99of9 on Feb 6th, 2011, 9:44pm Ok, I agree with you that your algorithm is more sensible, and that a skipped player should be tested first for the next opponent and not left to the end. It's a tough call as to whether it should be implemented immediately or next year, so I'll await Ron's decision with interest. I'm glad my opponent doesn't change either way - I played omar in the championship in 2007, 2009, 2010, and it's always nice to play the game's creator! |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 6th, 2011, 10:30pm I'm glad you keep coming back every year, 99of9. You, Omar, and Naveed are the only three players to have participated in all eight Arimaa World Championships so far. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by 99of9 on Feb 7th, 2011, 6:39am on 02/06/11 at 22:30:47, Fritzlein wrote:
It depends if you count the Open Classic ;) ... I'll be lucky if I can keep up that record this year. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by RonWeasley on Feb 7th, 2011, 10:05am on 02/06/11 at 19:16:26, Fritzlein wrote:
Because nobody has had to commit to a posted time yet, I want to use the pairings from the algorithm we prefer. They would be the pairings quoted above. If this question were asked later when players had already begun making plans based on the scheduler, I would use the inferior pairings. So Omar, please use the quoted pairing above. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Adanac on Feb 7th, 2011, 10:07am on 02/06/11 at 16:49:26, Fritzlein wrote:
This original post is worth a bump just in case RonWeasley didn't see yesterday's excellent analyis by Fritzlein. Since the players will be receiving their tentative game times within 24 hours we should get a ruling on this issue as quickly as possible. This is probably one of those divisive issues where some people will think it's fair to stick with whichever pairings are procued by the algorithm while others would prefer the TD to intervene and make changes where he deems it appropriate. I'm very interested to hear what the ruling will be. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Adanac on Feb 7th, 2011, 10:09am on 02/07/11 at 10:05:20, RonWeasley wrote:
You beat me by 2 minutes! Thanks for the ruling Ron, I'll go ahead and update the Wiki today. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by RonWeasley on Feb 7th, 2011, 10:34am on 02/07/11 at 10:09:06, Adanac wrote:
I'm glad I did. It makes me look less clueless than usual. ;D |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 7th, 2011, 2:22pm Thanks for the ruling, Ron. If there are issues like this in the fourth year of using a given format, you will have your work cut out for you next year, when we are in the first year of a new format! |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Adanac on Feb 7th, 2011, 4:28pm I was quite disappointed to see that we've already passed the deadline for the Spectator Contest and only 12 people signed up. What happened?? The Open Classic doubled in size this year while the Spectator Contest shrunk in half. ??? Edit: Oh, I'm pretty sure this was the first year in which Omar added an entry fee. That's probably the reason. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 7th, 2011, 5:26pm on 02/07/11 at 16:28:33, Adanac wrote:
Omar probably set the deadline for registration based on a five-round preliminary like we had last year. I assume he will accept registrations until the finals actually begin. Nevertheless, you are right; the lack of a registration fee last year made the contest something like a free raffle. Why not sign up? And everyone did. This year it will be more like a poker game where you shouldn't bring money to the table unless you are better than the other players. I would pay $10 just for the pleasure of playing in a great Arimaa tournament with no prizes (and in fact I have done so for the Postal Mixer), but for the Spectator Contest the money prizes are most of the pleasure. Why would I pay $10 to make guesses about the games? I can guess for free without paying a registration fee. The Spectator Contest as currently structured has appeal mostly for gamblers. And indeed, charging an entry fee for a guessing game probably brings it under the legal definition of gambling, unless guessing move numbers can be defended as a "game of skill", in which case the entry fee is no different than the entry fee to the World Championship itself. Shhhh... don't tell the authorities. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by 99of9 on Feb 7th, 2011, 6:00pm I find the new rules of the spectator contest too difficult for someone in a bad timezone for viewing games live. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 7th, 2011, 8:41pm on 02/07/11 at 18:00:42, 99of9 wrote:
True, the new rules give a substantial advantage to a live viewer. Presumably the ability to change prediction will end when the game ends, i.e. 15 minutes before the spectators know it has ended, or else it would be too easy to cheat. Indeed, for the games I'm playing, I would have to go out of my way not to let my wife know that the game has ended. And if the predictions can't be changed any more starting about five moves from the end, then an exact prediction won't always be necessary to win. That means people who aren't watching the game live have at least a little chance to win with a prediction that is close but not exact. It isn't as bad as if the games were truly live. But yes, if you can't watch the game live, you will still be at a disadvantage. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Feb 7th, 2011, 10:04pm on 02/07/11 at 10:05:20, RonWeasley wrote:
I've changed the pairing algorithm to fix this problem and ran the pairing again. It now matches what Karl and Greg expected. Although running the pairing again caused the colors of the players to be changed sometimes where the algorithm had a choice. The algorithm randomly assigns the color when it has a choice. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by RonWeasley on Feb 8th, 2011, 7:21am on 02/07/11 at 16:28:33, Adanac wrote:
I had already donated. So for me the Spectator Contest is free. I don't intend to change predictions in mid-game, even though Professor Trelawney is allowing it. I'm not even trying to understand that. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 8th, 2011, 9:23am on 02/07/11 at 22:04:06, omar wrote:
Thanks for changing that, Omar. I'm glad it was a small change to the algorithm, so you could re-run the automation rather than having to do the pairing by hand. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Adanac on Feb 8th, 2011, 9:41am on 02/07/11 at 20:41:36, Fritzlein wrote:
So the Spectator Contest provides another advantage to delayed broadcasts, in addition to the fact that the players are better prepared for post-game interviews. But, wow, what a huge disadvantage for players who can't watch the games live. Out of curiousity, will the system remember the initial predictions? Last year I entered them in the Wiki so that the community's pre-game predictions could be displayed after the game summary. With such a small number of contest participants this year, plus the ability to change predictions mid-game, it may not be worth the effort this time. But I can totally appreciate how the mid-game prediction changes would make live viewing more enjoyable. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Feb 8th, 2011, 6:58pm on 02/08/11 at 09:23:17, Fritzlein wrote:
Thanks to you and Greg for taking the time to ingestive this and explaining the root of the problem. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Feb 8th, 2011, 7:13pm on 02/08/11 at 09:41:14, Adanac wrote:
Well, I can keep a log of the predictions for the game over time and it could be used to see what the predictions were at the beginning of the game, if we needed to. But I would not suggest you entering this in the wiki; you are already doing a lot by writing the game highlights. I'll just provide a link to the log so people can see how the predictions changed over time. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Feb 8th, 2011, 7:42pm on 02/07/11 at 20:41:36, Fritzlein wrote:
I guess the advantage would decrease as the number of people participating increases. Quote:
Nope, a side effect of delaying reporting to the gameroom is that the ability to predict will not end until 15 minutes after the game is over. This by itself would not be a problem, except that the players will know the result. Players can't predict on their own games so a player would have to tell someone else. Maybe what I'll do is stop the ability to predict at about 30 minutes after the scheduled game start time. Although most WC finals games go way beyond 30 minutes, there could of course be some wild game that ends sooner and still run the risk of being leaked. This also will give some advantage to being present at the game, but not as much as being able to predict to the end. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 8th, 2011, 9:29pm on 02/08/11 at 19:42:35, omar wrote:
Yes, the more people that participate, the more likely it is that changing predictions mid-game will be of no use, because the winner will be an exact prediction entered before the game started. Since last year 30 predictors only managed to nail six out of sixteen games, this year 12 predictors should be expected to nail only two or three of sixteen games. Thus we should expect, with the low participation this year, that the ability to change mid-game will be very important. Quote:
Right, that's my point. If predictions can go on for fifteen minutes after the game, there is a huge loophole. Imagine this scenario: I am losing to chessandgo, but pull off a last-minute swindle to win on move 55. The winning contestant turns out to be my wife Katie, who entered her prediction five minutes before the game ended. Afterwards we both swear that I didn't let out a peep after I won, and that she was just watching the game, and got excited that I might come back, and changed her prediction at the last minute to have me winning just because she saw a chance that chessandgo might mess up. Well, we can say whatever we like, and it might even be true, but the situation is entirely untenable, because we had the means to cheat trivially, and you will never know if we did or not. Indeed, to avoid winning in a way that everyone could assume is cheating, Katie will have to handicap herself by making her bets on my games before the games start and not changing thereafter. Quote:
Allowing only 30 minutes of prediction-changing seems like a reasonable compromise. Everyone who changes his prediction after the game starts will have to wonder whether that exact prediction was made before the game by someone who isn't watching and isn't going to change, so that blunts the advantage of being a live watcher. Also, ending the ability to change prediction before the game ends takes away the easy avenue for cheating. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 8th, 2011, 9:43pm on 02/08/11 at 19:13:31, omar wrote:
But it is important not to display any information about what other people have predicted until after the cutoff for making changes. This is true whether the cutoff for making changes is before or after the start of the game. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by 99of9 on Feb 8th, 2011, 10:19pm on 02/08/11 at 21:29:53, Fritzlein wrote:
Karl will also have to handicap himself by not letting out groans and squeals during play. Imagine if you asked the tennis players to abide by such a handicap - there would be uproar! :D |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Janzert on Feb 8th, 2011, 10:41pm on 02/08/11 at 21:43:39, Fritzlein wrote:
Oh no, I hadn't considered that before. But I think you're right the predictions have to be hidden until after the predictions have closed. I dropped out of participating in the spectator contest after it was changed such that the best strategy for play was not to choose your best prediction for the outcome of the game. I still found it pretty interesting to find out at the start of a game what the predictions were though. I guess I'm pretty far away from the target for the spectator contest and I suppose the changes made probably have made it better for them, it just seems each change ends up making it less interesting to me. :( Janzert |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 8th, 2011, 11:32pm on 02/08/11 at 22:41:58, Janzert wrote:
My sentiments exactly. The original contest rewarded accurate estimation. Now it is more of a lottery. Quote:
Yes, I'm apparently not in the target audience either. But I'm not a gambler by nature. The majority of people seem to like bingo and raffles and guessing games. The less skill-based a game becomes, the more everyone can play along and have a chance. I think that's why Omar has evolved the spectator contest in the direction he has. After all, if people wanted a game of pure skill, they would be playing Arimaa. :) |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 8th, 2011, 11:41pm on 02/08/11 at 22:19:34, 99of9 wrote:
Oh, man, you don't want to know what you would have heard in my house during my game with rabbits, particularly after I realized how bad my move 45g was. Let's just say that vulgar and blasphemous don't entirely cover it... I suppose for my games Katie is going to have to leave her prediction unaltered regardless of when the change deadline is. But win or lose, she has fun keeping her predictions secret and teasing me about whether she is betting for or against me on any given game. :) |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Feb 9th, 2011, 7:35am I decided to go back to using last years format for the spectator contest to avoid the complications of allowing predictions to be changed during delayed games. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Feb 13th, 2011, 9:14am I think the TD needs to make a ruling on this. We had a situation where both players did not show up on time for the Harren vs qswanger game which was scheduled for 6:00 am my time. At about 7:14 am my time qswanger showed up to claim the forfeit. The server had not yet marked this game as abandoned and removed it, so qswanger was able to sit down at the game, but when he closed the game window to claim the forfeit the game was marked as abandoned by both players. I looked at the tournament rules and we state: Forfeits: If a player does not show up for the game within 15 minute after the scheduled start time then that player will lose by forfeit. To claim the forfeit the player that showed up just needs to exit the game window after the 15 minutes are over. However, the player can choose to give the opponent more time by keeping the window open. But how late can the player arrive to be able to claim the forfeit. I had thought that it was up to an hour after the game start time. I looked at the code and found that the player trying to claim the forfeit must arrive within the first 15 minutes and remain present until the first 15 minutes are over in order to claim the forfeit. So if you arrive after the first 15 minutes are over you do not get the forfeit. Even if you showed up 1 minute after the game start time and left before the first 15 minutes and then showed up again after the first 15 minutes you do not get the forfeit. In essence one must enter the game before the first 15 minutes and must not leave until after the first 15 minutes to claim the forfeit. qswanger stated in chat that Harren had emailed him that he would not be able to make it for the game. So qswanger thought there is no need to rush and he can claim the forfeit at any time. He did intent to show up at the game start time, but his alarm clock did not go off and he arrived 1 hour and 14 minutes late. I will change the wording next year to say: "To claim the forfeit the player must arrive within the first 15 minutes and must not leave until after the first 15 minutes are over. The forfeit will be awarded when the player exits the game window after the first 15 minutes are over. However, the player can choose to give the opponent more " We need the TD's ruling on this situation. Is it a forfeit for both players or does qswanger get the win by forfeit? |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 13th, 2011, 12:53pm We set a record! There were 38 simultaneous logins, and also 21 in chat plus 21 in radio+more in TeamSpeak. Yippee! (Of course I am sad that I lost to chessandgo (again), but I am happy it was at least a good show. :)) |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by RonWeasley on Feb 13th, 2011, 1:39pm On the question of qswanger-Harren, I am ruling the game a forfeit for both players. Both were later than the 15 minute grace period. The main motivation for this ruling is to avoid the specter of a game where both are late and at some long time after, both try to claim a win. Also, I don't want the tournament to have to distinguish between late and later. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Feb 13th, 2011, 2:51pm Thanks for the ruling RW. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by RonWeasley on Feb 14th, 2011, 7:41am on 02/13/11 at 13:39:11, RonWeasley wrote:
I want to qualify this ruling. What if both players show up 16 minutes late and want to play the game? I propose the following: If both players arrive beyond the 15 minute grace period, they may elect to play the game at tournament time control and appeal to the tournament director to have the game count instead of a double forfeit. In almost all cases, I would accept the game outcome in place of a double forfeit. This is, in effect, a rescheduling of the game. The requirement to appeal to the TD protects the tournament from abuse. I would encourage players finding themselves in this situation to play the game first and appeal later, rather than trying to contact the TD beforehand. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Adanac on Feb 14th, 2011, 11:16am Just for fun, I’d like to propose an alternate format for future World Championships. I’m curious to see how many other people enjoy these types of tournaments as much as I do. Tournament Structure A fixed-bracket head-to-head elimination event where the winners advance through the bracket and the losers from the first 2 rounds move on to a Relegation Swiss tournament. Players are seeded 1 to 32 with pairings such as #1 vs #32 and #16 vs #17 in round 1, with the 2 winners playing each other in round 2 #2 vs #31 and #15 vs #18 in round 1, with the 2 winners playing each other in round 2 The Final Eight The true intent of this system is to create exciting head-to-head matches between the world’s best players. So the longest matches and the bulk of the tournament would revolve around the final 3 rounds of the tournament. - Best-of-Five Head-to-Head Matches at a time control of 90 seconds per move. - Winners advance to the next round to play a new Best-of-Five match. - The first 3 games are played once per week for 3 weeks. The final 2 games, if necessary, are both tentatively scheduled for week 4. This is an intense 4th week but many matches won’t require a 5th game and this double-scheduling would knock 3 weeks off the total tournament time, one less week for each of the final 3 rounds. The Opening Rounds We could accommodate 32 players comfortably (certainly 64 or 128 are possible with 1 or 2 additional weeks, but the organization gets more difficult), but to avoid having the whole thing drag on for 5 months we’d need to play faster opening-round matches: -Best-of-Three Matches at a time control of 30 seconds per move. -Games are played consecutively with 30 minute breaks between games (or faster if the players agree). -Each player would need to schedule during a time slot where they have approximately 3 hours available. Relegation Swiss Of the initial 32 players, 24 would be eliminated during the first 2 weeks. They could participate in an 8-round Swiss tournament from weeks 3-10, coinciding with the Quarter-Finals & Semi-Finals. The Swiss would not continue on week 11 when the entire focus of the Arimaa community would be on the World Championship Finals & 3rd Place Match. This Relegation Swiss would be just for fun & practice, though we could give small gift certificates to the top finishers for incentive. Time controls could be 30, 45 or 60s, whatever the community prefers. The tournament director for this Swiss should be a volunteer other than Omar or Ned, so that they can focus on the survivors in the elimination matches. Schedule Week 1: 32 players in a Best-of-Three Elimination Match at 30s Week 2: 16 players in a Best-of-Three Elimination Match at 30s Weeks 3-6: 8 players in a Best-of-Five Elimination Match at 90s + first 4 Rounds of Relegation Swiss Weeks 7-10: 4 Players in a Best-of-Five Elimination + 24 players in Rounds 5-8 of Relegation Swiss Weeks 11-14: Finals & 3rd Place Match Obviously, there are huge compromises in the structure to accelerate the tournament in the opening weeks. The huge risk is that a top player would be eliminated during the 30s games. But when I look at the 30s Games History of the top players, it seems very likely that most would win their opening matches 2-0 or 2-1, with very few major upsets. There are obvious drawbacks to this system, but I really like the rivalry and drama built by head-to-head elimination matches in professional sports and the old Chess candidates cycle. I also believe that the stamina built up during matches would be good practice for us in the Arimaa Challenge versus the bots. And though it’s a gruelling event, there are times such as weeks such as 3, 7 and 11 when players can enter a new series without any immediate pressure of elimination. This would last no more than 14 weeks, though it could easily be reduced to 13 weeks or fewer with some tweaking. Only the first week would feature large numbers of official games (excluding the Relegation Swiss), so the workload for the Omar and the TD would be greatly reduced from weeks 2-14. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 14th, 2011, 11:44am The drama of head-to-head elimination play comes at the expense of more upsets. FIDE briefly embraced short knockout tournaments, but was embarrassed in 1999 when they had to crown the #36 seeded player (Khalifman) as the World Champion. The problem of turning the tournament into more of a lottery can be somewhat offset by playing more games, but note that for the 1999 FIDE World Championship the format was two games plus a tiebreaker if necessary, i.e. essentially best two out of three games in preliminary rounds, with best of five for the semis and best of seven for the finals, similar to your proposal. The other disadvantage of playing more games is, of course, more games. In a unified triple-elimination for 32 players, the champion would need to play at most 12 games (plus worst-case two byes). In your proposed format, he would need to play at most 21 games. Thus, the heightened drama of head-to-head single elimination weakens the efficiency of the floating triple elimination. For my money, I think we have enough excitement in floating triple elimination that we don't need the burden of extra games. Finally, while there is some heightening of drama due to single-elimination, I think the "rivalry" aspect of mini-matches is actually a net negative. When rabbits upset chessandgo, I was much more interested in the question, "Can rabbits beat Adanac too," as opposed to the question, "Can rabbits beat chessandgo again?" And I think after rabbits beat you, most spectators would have been less interested in a repeat of either chessandgo-rabbits or Adanac-rabbits than they were actually interested in Fritzlein-rabbits. As further evidence of low interest in rivalry pairings, the chatroom buzz looking forward to the first round of the finals was disappointed that chessandgo-Nombril and Adanac-rabbits will be repeats from the preliminaries when there are other pairings that haven't yet been seen. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Adanac on Feb 14th, 2011, 3:26pm If FIDE was “embarrassed” to crown a 2616-rated Grandmaster as their World Champion then why did they invite him to the tournament? They could have just restricted the event to a small number of 2700+ rated players rather than inviting a larger field of “tourists” (Kasparov’s infamous remark). Will the Arimaa community be embarrassed if a player with “only” a 2100 rating wins the World Championship or will we congratulate him for overcoming great odds to win it all? I’d guess the latter. And I’m not defending the 1999 FIDE tournament either. Back in the 1960s-1980s when Spassky, Fischer, Petrosian, Smyslov, Tal, Korchnoi, Larsen, Karpov, Polugaevsky, Portisch, Taimanov, and all the other GMs I forgot to mention played head-to-head candidates matches for the right to participate in the World Championship it was the golden age of chess and they produced many epic encounters (those head-to-head matches are the inspiration for my proposal). And the best player always seemed to emerge victorious for the right to play the defending World Champion. I much preferred that over the crapshoot 1999 tournament that featured a not-so-epic finale between Akopian & Khalifman. Partially it was due to the absence of Kasparov, Karpov and Anand, but also the upset losses by Kramnik, Polgar, Ivanchuk, etc. in short matches. I didn’t like the tournament before it started and I liked it even less after seeing how it unfolded. Similarly, in Arimaa everyone wants to see a Chessandgo-Fritzlein finale and while everyone likes to see an occasional upset here and there, few spectators want to see no-name finalists competing in the final round. However, the odds of my proposed tournament unfolding that way are much, much slimmer. Unlike that 1999 FIDE tournament which often involved matches between 2600 vs. 2700 rated opponents (i.e. reasonable chance of an upset in any short match), the opening rounds of an Arimaa tournament will have relatively few close matches. I’d be surprised if any 1900 players can pull off not 1 but 2 upsets in a three-game match against a 2300+ rated player. Maybe one of the top 5 players will be eliminated during the first two rounds, but more likely that won’t happen. Upsets occur rarely in Arimaa WC tournaments and when they do occur it’s often because the underdog was better than the community had previously realized. Yes, my proposal does ask the World Champion to play a few more games to win the title than the current system does, but I think a few more games, with a higher percentage of those games occurring between the highest-rated players, is more of an advantage than a disadvantage. We enjoy playing this game, right? :D I did try to compress my proposal down as tightly as possible, but it’s obviously tough to have both an open field for all registrants and a lengthy series of matches. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 14th, 2011, 3:57pm on 02/14/11 at 15:26:32, Adanac wrote:
Maybe "embarrassed" is the wrong word. I should have said that FIDE was "discredited". But in any case, the reason to invite a large field to play is for the sake of fairness and legitimacy. The eventual World Champion isn't protected from having to play anyone. No one can be shut out of the title like in early days when champions could avoid certain contenders. (That issue was part of the reason for forming FIDE, if I understand correctly.) Having the legitimacy that an open format confers is a separate issue from choosing a format that allows the best players to win most of the time. Quote:
Well, the more we lessen the "great odds" an underdog has to overcome, i.e. the more we make the Arimaa World Championship like a lottery, then the less congratulations are due to an underdog that wins it. Khalifman was simply not deserving of the respect that he would have been deserving of had he won the FIDE World Championship in the traditional way. Or do you think he was just as legitimate as Petrosian because the title "World Champion" was the same? Quote:
Hmmm, if you didn't like the FIDE knockout tournament structure, then why propose such a similar structure for the Arimaa World Championship? Quote:
Hmmm, if the chess championships of the 1960's-1980's are the inspiration for your proposal, then why not propose something for Arimaa similar to what inspired you? Those candidates cycles were very slow and deliberate, with long matches that gave an excellent chance that the better player would prevail. They weren't trying to cram everything into a few weeks like the FIDE knockouts. Quote:
I agree that Arimaa ratings are more spread out than chess ratings, so upsets are less likely for the present. But I would say (A) that could change in the future and (B) just because we can get away with an inefficient format doesn't mean that efficiency is irrelevant. Quote:
Absolutely, I like playing more games. I have often found myself pressing for longer World Championship formats against Omar's resistance to the tournament dragging on for a long time. But separate from the number of games to be played is a question of how best to allocate those games. If we all agree that the World Champion might need to play 21 games to take the crown, then I would much prefer a floating quintuple-elimination over your proposed format. It's more bang for the buck. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by robinz on Feb 14th, 2011, 4:38pm Sorry all, I'm only a newbie, so I quite understand if my opinion is judged not to be important :) But I sympathise with Adanac's view that the long knockout matches of the way the World Chess Championship cycles were traditionally run were a great thing, and something similar in the Arimaa WC could be very exciting for the spectators. (Well, for this one, at least ;)) But I also understand the objection to his proposal, namely that the matches aren't long enough to avoid a feeling that they may be decided more on luck than on skill. But I'm not sure that's so different from the current format - it's not the same format, of course, but still, as I understand it, a player in the second stage goes out as soon as he has lost 2 games, so I don't see why this is any less open to a strong player going out after suffering just one or two unexpected setbacks. So my ideal system would be to have something much like the Swiss system qualifier that we now have, but the top 8 from that competing, not in some short elimination tournament, but in a series of knockout matches, say of 8/10/12 games? I realise that this would take quite a long time, so there might not be space in the calendar for it (especially as some kind of tiebreak would need to be arranged for matches that were still level after the expected series of games). If it's totally unfeasible, then fair enough (although there may be workarounds - perhaps only having the top 4, not the top 8 - or even just the top 2 - playing matches), but I thought I'd suggest it, as it's what I would like to see, and the comments from Fritzlein and Adanac don't sound like their thoughts are too far away from mine. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by aaaa on Feb 14th, 2011, 9:39pm Performance ratings of the Open Classic participants, assuming a prior of .5/1 against a 1500-rated player, ignoring only the one double forfeit:
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Adanac on Feb 15th, 2011, 1:08pm Raising the F-Factor in the Strength of Schedule tie-breaker did have an impact on the final standings, though the same 8 people would have qualified with any F value. For any high value of F, including the value of 3.696 that we used this year, Tuks finished 3rd and I finished 4th. For any value less than 2.92, that would have flipped with me in 3rd and Tuks in 4th. Of course, the pairings in earlier rounds could have been different as well, and the ripple effect of those different pairings might have impacted the Final 8. We'll never know. :-/ Tuks and I faced three common opponents (99of9, Nevermind, rabbits) but the differences were: Tuks played: Fritzlein 5 wins ocmiente 2 wins qswanger 2 wins I played: Nombril 4 wins Omar 4 wins knarl 2 wins I'm the only person in the Top 4 that didn't face any 5 win opponents (by contrast, rabbits played all four 5 win players), so my 4 & 4 win opponents didn't value as highly as Tuks 5 & 2 win opponents. And that makes sense for a high value of F (which is driven by a high Standard Deviation amongst tournament participans). |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Tuks on Feb 15th, 2011, 3:48pm wow, the whr is very close to the actual last 8 results, the only difference is rabbits has a higher whr than adanac despite one less victory. has anyone thought of using whr instead of SoS? it creates the same pairings in round 1+2 and seems to show the strength of someones schedule well |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 20th, 2011, 5:25pm on 02/13/11 at 12:53:49, Fritzlein wrote:
And now 33 peak radio viewers for rabbits beating hanzack. The records are falling fast and furious. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 27th, 2011, 12:32pm on 02/20/11 at 17:25:55, Fritzlein wrote:
And 34 peak listeners for Adanac vs. Tuks. Another game, another record; <yawns> ;) |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 27th, 2011, 4:51pm on 02/27/11 at 12:32:11, Fritzlein wrote:
New records set during my game with Nombril: 52 simultaneous logins to the game room and 44 peak listeners to the radio. :o |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by omar on Feb 27th, 2011, 11:05pm I checked the load on the server when there was about 50 people logged into the gameroom and the load was only 0.66. For a long time I used to worry that if the site got such traffic it might crash of get too slow. Especially during WC games, I didn't want games to get messed up due to the server getting overloaded. Now am not so worried. I think we could have 500 simultaneous logins without any problem as long as bots aren't running. So go ahead and blow your horn. Tell the world about the Arimaa world championship. Once a year we have this great event and a lot of effort from many people goes into making it happen. It's a great way to showcase Arimaa to your friends. Don't just come to watch the games alone; bring a friend along. I've updated this page: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/wc/2011/showGames.cgi so that it will show game times in local time even if you are not logged into the gameroom or don't even have an account on the server. So this is a good link to share with others. I the goal of reaching 50 peak listeners during the last games is looking more attainable. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Hippo on Feb 28th, 2011, 3:42am on 02/27/11 at 16:51:16, Fritzlein wrote:
Yes, and you even did't have to sacrify your "last life" to achieve that :). It was very nice show. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by chessandgo on Feb 28th, 2011, 5:23am Cats are like Fritz; they have more lives than you expect :) |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Hippo on Feb 28th, 2011, 2:56pm on 02/28/11 at 05:23:12, chessandgo wrote:
That was reaction to the Fritzlein post mentioning new record what cost him one life. Actually I cannot find the post. Did I made it up? |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 28th, 2011, 3:56pm on 02/28/11 at 14:56:58, Hippo wrote:
You are not hallucinating. I accidentally deleted that post while trying to respond to it, i.e. I clicked "Modify" instead of "Quote". |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by SpeedRazor on Feb 28th, 2011, 5:47pm on 02/28/11 at 05:23:12, chessandgo wrote:
Karl "The Cat" Junke. One life left; can he do it? To popularize - and humanize - Arimaa, maybe all of the Top players might get an nickname. (And if they don't like it, all the better! Controversy is interesting...) [Edit]: Maybe even a couple of [appropriate] Arimaa personages under 2000 rating might have a nickname, also. Omar, and that eloquent British sounding chap who lives in the Hagia Sophia, come to mind... |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by Fritzlein on Feb 28th, 2011, 8:42pm on 02/28/11 at 17:47:31, SpeedRazor wrote:
I would have to change my forum icon... |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by megajester on Mar 1st, 2011, 12:23am on 02/28/11 at 17:47:31, SpeedRazor wrote:
ROFL :D:D:D:D:D:D:D |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by chessandgo on Mar 1st, 2011, 3:13am Joel "Muezzin" Thomas? :) Omar "Father" Syed? :) |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by chessandgo on Mar 1st, 2011, 3:15am on 02/28/11 at 20:42:52, Fritzlein wrote:
Yeah, they call you "the elephant of arimaa", people try to give you a "cat" nickname, and you have a rabbit for forum icon? That's two too many animals. |
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Title: Re: 2011 World Championship Post by megajester on Mar 1st, 2011, 4:33am on 03/01/11 at 03:13:39, chessandgo wrote:
LOL that would be the guy who wakes me up at 5 in the morning :) What about "the Great Khan"? :D |
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