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(Message started by: Janzert on Apr 26th, 2014, 2:00pm)

Title: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Janzert on Apr 26th, 2014, 2:00pm
I’m starting this thread as a place to discuss possible changes to the rules and format for next year’s world championship.

First, if the community and Omar wants me again, I’m willing to take on the roll of TD and rule “legislator” another time. There is roughly a 20% chance that I won’t be available though and I certainly won’t mind if someone else wants to take up the mantle. I should know for sure by October if I won’t be available.

Here are the list of things I noticed during the tournament for possible changes: (in the order I wrote them down ;) )
Save order of player signup
Prepare players for first early unbalanced games or try to reduce the mismatches?
Clarify forfeit rules wording, particularly for case where 1 player shows up but leaves before 15 minutes is up.
Double, triple, quadruple check the time controls are set correctly. :(
Allow players to rejoin after missing one or more rounds
Allow players to rejoin via any communication channel (with the only guaranteed method being the forum thread)
Get a way so TCs can 'peek' at game results that bypasses the delay
Have the server assign the forfeit after 15 minutes automatically
Allow TCs more expression when scheduling (Will be at a game, Can be at a game)?
Add a rules mention on chatting to the opponent during the game, overall add more information to set expectations of player behavior.
Specify sainte-lague tie break
Split prize fund based on wins only
Shift scheduling window (maybe a day later?)
Maybe a separate wiki page with step by step instruction for every aspect of the tournament (e.g. setting time preferences, joining/starting the game)

See also the post tournament survey results (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=events;action=display;num=1398538710;start=0#0) for more ideas on things to change.

Janzert

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Fritzlein on Apr 26th, 2014, 3:40pm
Another thing I would like to see changed for next year is that byes count as wins for the final standings.  Right now getting a bye in the preliminaries is a punishment for having done well and/or having been highly seeded.

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Fritzlein on Apr 26th, 2014, 4:05pm
It is interesting that there were multiple complaints about large mismatches in early rounds, but not from the affected players.  One question in my mind is whether lots of low-rated players would sign up for the World Championship even if it weren't the only tournament of the year.  If there were other tournaments that were stratified to avoid mismatches, would those opportunites be enough to keep low-rated players happy, and would they therefore simply sit out the World Championship?

I know that at least several lower-rated players would prefer to go to the big dance, even if they get clobbered in all of their first three games.  There is something thrilling about starting off on equal footing, only ten wins from being World Champion, just like everyone else, even if your chances of actually winning are tiny.

There is however, a solution that would not be too technically difficult: Let players, at the time of registration, opt out of the money section and directly into the participation section.  That is to say, let the Swiss pairing apply to everyone who has lost three times OR who wanted to start in the Swiss section in the first place.  As the tournament progresses, more and more players get shunted from the money section into the Swiss section.

Note that I am not actually recommending this solution, because I expect that nobody would take advantage of the option to play in the Swiss section from the start, so it would be wasted effort.  But I could be wrong, and I wanted to propose the idea in case any forum readers would contradict me and say that they would indeed sign up to go straight to the Swiss.

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by crazyharry on May 17th, 2014, 1:33pm

on 04/26/14 at 16:05:08, Fritzlein wrote:
Note that I am not actually recommending this solution, because I expect that nobody would take advantage of the option to play in the Swiss section from the start, so it would be wasted effort.  But I could be wrong, and I wanted to propose the idea in case any forum readers would contradict me and say that they would indeed sign up to go straight to the Swiss.


I think ultimately your assessment is pretty correct. Typically I don't mind getting clobbered in the early rounds because it's a good opportunity to play against more skilled players. I think I would be unlikely to play in just the Swiss section if the option were available simply because my goal is always to make it to the money rounds.

The mismatches might be avoided by splitting the field into two or more divisions based on rating, and spending the first two rounds folding within the divisions, then eliminating the divisions and playing normally from there on out. I'm just not sure if it could be implemented fairly, and it seems like it would result in more mismatch games, but with a smaller rating disparity than under the current system. I don't know that we could consider that a higher quality tournament, and I don't know that it would be worth adding complexity to the format.

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by clyring on Sep 1st, 2014, 10:42pm
I'm thinking it will soon be time to start a second round of discussion on the details. Some thoughts on the ideas so far:

Save order of player signup
I don't see how this could hurt, but it isn't a necessity.

Prepare players for first early unbalanced games or try to reduce the mismatches?
I brought this up quite a bit at the beginning of the tournament, but have started to get the impression that the stronger players have probably been more psychologically burdened by this. :)

Clarify forfeit rules wording, particularly for case where 1 player shows up but leaves before 15 minutes is up.
That is a thorny situation. I might even imagine an extreme version of this where one player sits and leaves, then the other player does the same before the 15 minutes are up. I'm wondering whether it would be best to judge forfeits only based on who is seated at the end of the 15 minutes and say 'tough luck' to anybody who doesn't wait that long.

Double, triple, quadruple check the time controls are set correctly. :(
That nobody noticed until round 2 speaks to the insignificance of this mistake, even though obviously we should try not to repeat it. :)

Allow players to rejoin after missing one or more rounds
I'm not sure how I feel about this yet. I'm curious how others feel about this.

Allow players to rejoin via any communication channel (with the only guaranteed method being the forum thread)
Sounds reasonable.

Get a way so TCs can 'peek' at game results that bypasses the delay
Have the server assign the forfeit after 15 minutes automatically

"Would be neato if..."

Allow TCs more expression when scheduling (Will be at a game, Can be at a game)?
Fortunately this requires no new infrastructure, just awareness among TCs. :)

Specify sainte-lague tie break
Almost anything is reasonable here.

Split prize fund based on wins only
I think I prefer last year's system of prizes proportional to 1/n, but this is not immensely important to me.

Shift scheduling window (maybe a day later?)
I personally like to know the probable game schedule early as it gives me more time to check my schedule and decide which games I should commentate and/or TC. Of course I am not the only user who matters here, though. :)

Maybe a separate wiki page with step by step instruction for every aspect of the tournament (e.g. setting time preferences, joining/starting the game)
This sounds useful. Do we have any volunteers for creating this?

Add a rules mention on chatting to the opponent during the game, overall add more information to set expectations of player behavior.
Not urgently needed, but couldn't hurt. Maybe it would be better as a component of the previous item, though.

Another thing I would like to see changed for next year is that byes count as wins for the final standings.
I support this.

Let players, at the time of registration, opt out of the money section and directly into the participation section.
I'm willing to experiment with this, but also have doubts about whether it will be used.

Perhaps if you finish all your games and don't make the finals - you get your entry fee back.
Perhaps not the whole entry fee, but I think some additional incentive to not forfeit any rounds would be a welcome change to the format.


How do people feel about time controls such as 30s/30m, 30s/1h, 30s/1h30m or those mentioned by Janzert in the survey thread? I support experimenting with these, foremost in my mind being the advantage that time controls with more reserve and less increment naturally lead to more consistent game lengths and easier scheduling.
EDIT: For clarity, I don't mean these exact time controls, but rather, similar time controls with reasonable max move and game lengths.


I originally wanted to push for giving each player a fourth life because in both of the last two tournaments I have wanted more games as a player even if I get tired as a commentator after several rounds. The results of the post-tournament survey show I am clearly in the minority about this, though. :)

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by browni3141 on Sep 1st, 2014, 10:58pm

on 09/01/14 at 22:42:58, clyring wrote:
Split prize fund based on wins only
I think I prefer last year's system of prizes proportional to 1/n, but this is not immensely important to me.


I also prefer last year's system, but of course I'm biased against spreading out the money so much.


Quote:
How do people feel about time controls such as 30s/30m, 30s/1h, 30s/1h30m or those mentioned by Janzert in the survey thread? I support experimenting with these, foremost in my mind being the advantage that time controls with more reserve and less increment naturally lead to more consistent game lengths and easier scheduling.

I  would personally be willing to try this.


Quote:
I originally wanted to push for giving each player a fourth life because in both of the last two tournaments I have wanted more games as a player even if I get tired as a commentator after several rounds. The results of the post-tournament survey show I am clearly in the minority about this, though. :)

I would like this because it means more HvH games. I also believe it would favor me in the tournament.

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Boo on Sep 3rd, 2014, 6:50am
I think three lives is optimal. 4 lives would make the long tournament even longer.

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Janzert on Sep 13th, 2014, 7:16pm
It seems likely that we won't be able to get any server changes finished before the WC, so anything requiring that is out.

I'm also not going to consider any major changes to timecontrol or overall tournament format. So 3 lives stays and no major change to something like 60s/60m timecontrol. I will consider minor adjustment to the timecontrols or shifting when timecontrol changes from one stage to the next if there is enough support shown.

I should also mention that my initial list posted above was mostly written as a todo for myself. So the above list trimmed down to just rules changes and then to ones can be done without server changes gets down to just this I believe:

on 04/26/14 at 14:00:06, Janzert wrote:
Clarify forfeit rules wording, particularly for case where 1 player shows up but leaves before 15 minutes is up.
Allow players to rejoin via any communication channel (with the only guaranteed method being the forum thread)
Add a rules mention on chatting to the opponent during the game, overall add more information to set expectations of player behavior.
Specify sainte-lague tie break
Split prize fund based on wins only


I don't think any of these are actually contentious except for the last one, they're just things I need to actually write up.

Regarding splitting the prize fund my feeling is most people prefer leaving it the way it is.

There was feedback in the post tournament survey regarding reducing the effect of initial seeding. Including a concrete suggestion to reduce the weight of the virtual games fed into the tournament performance rating.

I don't have a good feel myself for counting byes as wins for the final standings. I should play with this and form some opinion. I'd love to hear anyone else chime in on this as well, so far I believe we're at two people in favor of it and one opposed.

Anything else I've missed?

Janzert


Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Kushiel on Sep 15th, 2014, 4:01pm
Not sure if it's still relevant, but you could multiply win ratio * # of rounds to determine # of wins for players who had byes.

This avoids giving a free win to someone who otherwise loses all their games, while still allowing a player to control whether they end up with a perfect record.

If you win 7/7 games with a bye for the 8th, 7/7 * 8 = 8 wins for final standings purposes.

If you win 0/7 games with a bye for the 8th, 0/7 * 8 = 0 wins for final standings purposes.

The behavior at the extremes is intuitive, reasonable, and the formula is not complicated.

The downside is that you could end up with fractional wins if someone wins 6/7 games, gets a bye for the 8th, the final win ratio is 6/7*8 = 6 and 6/7.

To avoid this downside you could round if having whole numbers of wins is important. This could skew results though, as someone who wins 3/7 games (wins first 3 against easiest opponents then loses following 4 against progressively harder opponents) could claim they should be credited with 4 wins rather than 3 since it's intuitive if they'd had an even easier first round match they'd have won that too.

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by clyring on Sep 15th, 2014, 7:34pm

on 09/15/14 at 16:01:42, Kushiel wrote:
Not sure if it's still relevant, but you could multiply win ratio * # of rounds to determine # of wins for players who had byes. (...)
For finalists, this is practically equivalent to the 2013-4 system of ranking first by wins and then by internal performance rating since the pairings try to give byes only to those players with the highest internal performance ratings where this is reasonable.
See also this relevant thread (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=events;action=display;num=1395260195). My current feeling is that ranking by performance rating is marginally better than ranking by wins including byes first, which is in turn better than ranking by wins not including byes: The only real exception, as mentioned by aaaa in the linked thread, involves playoff games. Maybe there is a natural way to handle this in a performance-rating ranking, though: Treat two players as 'close enough' if adding a virtual half-win by the lower-ranked player against the higher-ranked player switches their order.

I'm also not going to consider any major changes to timecontrol or overall tournament format. So 3 lives stays and no major change to something like 60s/60m timecontrol.
I won't mourn 3 lives, but still want to hear more discussion on possible changes to the time control.

There was feedback in the post tournament survey regarding reducing the effect of initial seeding. Including a concrete suggestion to reduce the weight of the virtual games fed into the tournament performance rating.
I'm not sure that seeds are a very meaningful influence in the current format. At the end of the day, it still comes down to winning games. (I'm not even convinced this is a bad thing.)
(That said, maybe it would be better if the final rankings, even if not the pairings, were done by UTPR.)

Anything else I've missed?
What of the suggestion to allocate a small portion of the registration fees as an incentive for players to not forfeit any games?

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Janzert on Sep 18th, 2014, 8:59pm

on 09/15/14 at 19:34:37, clyring wrote:
I'm also not going to consider any major changes to timecontrol or overall tournament format. So 3 lives stays and no major change to something like 60s/60m timecontrol.
I won't mourn 3 lives, but still want to hear more discussion on possible changes to the time control.


The primary tension in choosing the time controls seems to come down to how spectator friendly versus player friendly to make them. For me personally the primary metric for spectator friendliness seems to come down to roughly something like, inversely proportional to the time taken for the 80th percentile of moves.  For many player's it seems freedom of choice (i.e. allocating the overall game time to moves however they see fit) is the most appealing metric. Personally I think that metric is probably actually counterproductive for most players, most of the time. But I'm not too concerned about protecting player's from themselves if they aren't going to hurt others in the process. ;)

I also want to keep a continuity of experience across years. That and the lack of community experience with an initial reserve many times in excess of the increment, rules out wholesale dumping the current timecontrols and moving to them. Beyond that most debate seems to be going into increasing the maximum turn time.

Even though I don't think increasing the limit for the longest time control will effect spectators much, I'm leery to do anything that would cause the cause the time control that is hardest on spectators and commentators even more problems. So my current thought and leaning is to make the limit the same 6 minutes for all three timecontrols used.


Quote:
There was feedback in the post tournament survey regarding reducing the effect of initial seeding. Including a concrete suggestion to reduce the weight of the virtual games fed into the tournament performance rating.
I'm not sure that seeds are a very meaningful influence in the current format. At the end of the day, it still comes down to winning games. (I'm not even convinced this is a bad thing.)
(That said, maybe it would be better if the final rankings, even if not the pairings, were done by UTPR.)


Given the overall low amount of feedback and push for change as well as lack of consensus, I'm starting to lean toward leaving all ranking and pairing changes alone for a year.


Quote:
Anything else I've missed?
What of the suggestion to allocate a small portion of the registration fees as an incentive for players to not forfeit any games?


I'm not opposed to this but I'm also almost completely unsure how much effect it will have (by one line of reasoning I expect it to have almost no effect, by another that it will have quite a large effect). ;) If there is general support for it I would be in favor of trying it but would want to ok it, or any other monetary changes, with Omar first.

Janzert

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by aaaa on Sep 19th, 2014, 4:23am
If, when it comes to time control, you are going to start making (minor) concessions to the players (at the supposed expense of the spectators), then partial banking should really be the first thing to go. Why should players be punished with having less time left after being more dynamic in allocating the same total amount of time over a given number of moves?

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Janzert on Sep 19th, 2014, 1:00pm
Because the players aren't complaining about partial banking, they're complaining about max turn time. ;)

Janzert

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by browni3141 on Sep 20th, 2014, 12:13pm

on 09/19/14 at 13:00:21, Janzert wrote:
Because the players aren't complaining about partial banking, they're complaining about max turn time. ;)

Janzert

Now's a good time to note that I don't really either, I've just been focusing on the one that noticeably bothered me in the last WC. The 75% reserve added feels more like an inconvenience, while the max move time is all the way up to frustrating ;)

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Janzert on Oct 12th, 2014, 1:23am

on 04/26/14 at 15:40:40, Fritzlein wrote:
Another thing I would like to see changed for next year is that byes count as wins for the final standings.  Right now getting a bye in the preliminaries is a punishment for having done well and/or having been highly seeded.


Going back and reviewing this suggestion one more time I'm now leaning pretty strongly toward making this change. In both the 2013 and 2014 tournaments all the players this directly effected would be moved ahead of players they beat over the board (2014: 99of9 and Adanac, 2013: omar).

I recall this being discussed in chat before and the discussion leaving me slightly in favor of the change, but I don't recall specifically the arguments for and against. I'd appreciate hearing the pros and cons again, whether brought up before or not.

Janzert

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by aaaa on Oct 12th, 2014, 8:18am
Imagine three players being left with one life each and an equal number of wins. Then whoever gets the bye will not only have to win just one game for the championship instead of two, but would additionally be guaranteed second place. That's excessive.

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Janzert on Oct 12th, 2014, 5:04pm
Yes that would be bad, although how bad would depend on the complete tournament history. We've also yet to see that situation arise in the actual tournaments.

So in the past two years when the rule would make any difference it seems to be better and looking back further I didn't see any instance where it would have had an effect at all.

Janzert

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Fritzlein on Oct 12th, 2014, 11:36pm

on 10/12/14 at 08:18:48, aaaa wrote:
Imagine three players being left with one life each and an equal number of wins. Then whoever gets the bye will not only have to win just one game for the championship instead of two, but would additionally be guaranteed second place. That's excessive.

By that time the three players will have each played ten games or more.  We have seen huge strength of schedule differences accumulate in a smaller number of games than that.  Indeed, it is entirely possible that the SoS of the top performer will be more than 0.5 expected losses tougher than the SoS of either or both opponents.  In the latter case, it is not excessive to give the top performer the bye.  On the contrary, since giving him the bye gives each of his opponents 0.5 expected losses, it is possible that the bye-counting-as-a-win is less than he deserves.  He ought to get an even bigger reward than needing to win one while the others need to win two.  Yes, it would be unfair to count a bye as a win if your scenario arose when all three players had essentially identical SoS to that point, but based on recent experience, substantial inequality seems more likely, and indeed, not counting the bye as a win seems at least as likely to be the more unfair scenario.

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Fritzlein on Oct 13th, 2014, 12:31am
By the way, I realize that I'm being fuzzy by measuring strength of schedule in terms of "expected losses", since expected win percentage depends on the strength of the player.  Of course, if Player A has a lower rating than Player B, he has more expected losses against identical opposition, but identical opponents are by definition an equally difficult strength of schedule.

Even so, I think the concept of expected losses is relevant not only to measure which of two players has had the tougher road, but also to quantify how much tougher.  To make the comparison fair, you simply have to hypothesize that the two players being compared are of equal strength.

For example, let's take 99of9 and myself after eight rounds in last year's World Championship.  Neither of us had had a bye yet.  We were both on the point of elimination with two losses so far.  There were seven players left, not three, so the situation is less extreme than proposed above, but of a similar nature.

Let's estimate how "excessive" it would have been to give 99of9 a bye-counting-as-a-win while making me play the next round.  (That would have given me the chance of being eliminated and automatically placing behind 99of9 even if he lost the following round so that we finished with an equal number of wins over the board.)  Let's average our two seed ratings of 2619 and 2189 to get an assumed strength of 2404 for the two of us.  Now, assuming everyone else's seed ratings were correct, how tough had our respective schedules been to that point?

My schedule had been

Opponent  Rating  Expected Losses
--------  ------  ---------------
CENTAURO    1323  0.002
RmznA    .  1820  0.034
SilverMitt  1546  0.007
chessandgo  2448  0.563
clyring  .  2174  0.210
supersamu   2279  0.327
99of9    .  2404  0.500
Hippo    .  2270  0.316


with a total of 1.959 expected losses

99of9's schedule had been

Opponent  Rating  Expected Losses
--------  ------  ---------------
aurelian .  1577  0.008
Thiagor  .  2271  0.317
browni3141  2487  0.617
odin73   .  2086  0.138
Hippo    .  2270  0.316
Tuks    .   2249  0.291
Fritzlein   2404  0.500
chessandgo  2448  0.563


with a total of 2.751 expected losses.

Thus if we had given 99of9 a bye-counting-as-win in the next round, whereas you had stuck me with half an expected loss, I still wouldn't have matched the toughness of his schedule.  He was in fact granted a bye at that point, and he had totally earned the right for it to count as a win.  Giving him a bye that didn't count as a win was grossly unfair.

Yes, I know we have only had the current format for a short time, and that next year the pairings could shake out very differently.  Nevertheless, I repeat my claim that it seems at least as likely that giving a bye-counting-as-win in a late round will be a justified reward as that it will be unjustified.

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Janzert on Oct 13th, 2014, 5:34pm
Thanks for the detailed analysis Fritz.

Just looking at both the historical record and a number of test tournaments counting byes as wins certainly seems better. I've also been working on looking at a large number of tournaments using a defined error function.

My current error metric is the root mean square of (1/rank) - (1/target rank), to mirror the error in prize payout. For the target ranking I've been looking at both rank by true rating and rank by uTPR. Does this seem like a reasonable measurement?

I have a long run going now and I've have to run at the moment so I'll post detailed results later.

Janzert

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Fritzlein on Oct 16th, 2014, 12:21am

on 10/13/14 at 17:34:23, Janzert wrote:
My current error metric is the root mean square of (1/rank) - (1/target rank), to mirror the error in prize payout. For the target ranking I've been looking at both rank by true rating and rank by uTPR. Does this seem like a reasonable measurement?

Hmmm, I don't much like the target rank being determined by player rating.  In that case we could minimize the "error" by giving the #1 seed a bye counting as a win every round. :)  I like uTPR rank as a target much better, but using it as a measuring stick definitely raises the question of why we would rank on wins and byes at all instead of directly using uTPR.  Clearly ranking by uTPR will have the least error if we measure error relative to uTPR.

I'm afraid your project of measuring whether it is better or worse to count byes as wins is doomed by a lack of clarity on what is "better".  So far, based on our limited experience, uTPR seems like a good guide, but you can bet that if we used it for prize payouts, there would eventually arise a case in which uTPR was clearly unfair, for reasons that we can't clearly anticipate at present. :-X

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Janzert on Oct 16th, 2014, 2:59am
Sorry for leaving this hanging, seems there is always another test that can be run.

So for those that don't want to read all details, the overall conclusion is despite a lot of variability treating byes as wins for ranking is certainly better using the measures in the previous post. I'm am definitely planning to switch to it. But it does open up another question regarding tie breaks, see the end of this post.

For each chart the players in a tournament were chosen uniformly from a rating range as shown in the chart title, either 25 or 50 elo points per player. The Players were then seeded in the tournament with a gaussian distribution having a standard deviation as shown, 0, 25, or 500. 1000 tournaments were run for each tournament size for the given settings. I'm sure someone here could tell what the resulting confidence intervals are, but I haven't gone and looked up how to calculate it again. My feeling is that they are still fairly broad though.

The blue line in each chart labeled "Has Effect" is the percentage of tournaments that the rule change makes a difference. The red line, labeled "Better True", is the percentage of times when there is a difference that the bye+win rule performance better as measured against the ranking using the true ratings of the players. The yellow line, labeled "Better TPR", is the same when comparing against the final rankings by uTPR.

Rating range of 50 per player:
http://www.dropbox.com/s/df2fcxj65nu78ll/byewin50rpp0ns.jpg?dl=1

http://www.dropbox.com/s/micil064gj5rsc2/byewin50rpp25ns.jpg?dl=1

http://www.dropbox.com/s/bec419doscfiqpb/byewin50rpp500ns.jpg?dl=1

Rating range of 25 per player:
http://www.dropbox.com/s/5bcvlzt71j6zyj5/byewin25rpp0ns.jpg?dl=1

http://www.dropbox.com/s/i9gdpbetf5c7v8z/byewin25rpp25ns.jpg?dl=1

http://www.dropbox.com/s/343dgrgvwkr99no/byewin25rpp500ns.jpg?dl=1

As you can see there is quite a bit of variability, particularly an even-odd effect when measured against the true rankings. Also it seems as the player ratings get closer and the seeds get worse it becomes closer to even with the win only rule.

The question now is what to do about tie breaks for 2nd and 3rd place. As was pointed out in the chatroom, the current tie break will never trigger for 2nd place. It seems rather odd to possibly play an extra game to determine 3rd place but not 2nd. I think if we were starting from scratch I would argue for no extra tie breaks at all.

Janzert

p.s. I started this post prior to Fritzlein's post above, and only finally posted it because I really have to get to bed. So I'll try and absorb and respond to Fritzlein's post tomorrow.

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Janzert on Oct 16th, 2014, 12:21pm

on 10/16/14 at 00:21:08, Fritzlein wrote:
Hmmm, I don't much like the target rank being determined by player rating.  In that case we could minimize the "error" by giving the #1 seed a bye counting as a win every round. :)


Insomuch as you trust the seed yes. ;)


Quote:
I'm afraid your project of measuring whether it is better or worse to count byes as wins is doomed by a lack of clarity on what is "better".


Yes this is certainly the crucial element, how to decide what is better. The reason I chose to look at true ranking and tpr ranking is that for me they are two important aspects that, while not directly in competition, often end up being oppositely favored when given other constraints. They also seem to be fairly representative of two different philosophies for what the tournament should be*. Happily in this case the change tends to improve both.

Of course if someone else has a metric that I can implement easily I'd be happy to take a look at it as well. Although I'm about to leave town for a few days so it probably won't be until next week.

While I don't mind continuing a conversation on the topic, I guess at this point unless someone comes up with surprising new information I'm pretty well decided on this change. So I'd really like to hear more on what to do with the tie break system.

Janzert

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Fritzlein on Oct 17th, 2014, 12:07am
It is indeed promising that the change improves performance on two very different metrics.  As for playoff games, I'm happy to do without.  The round of elimination would be the primary ranking, with ties broken by UTPR, including a potential tie for third/fourth place.  But I also wouldn't mind retaining a playoff game if third/fourth are eliminated in the same round.

It doesn't seems weird to me to have a playoff to break a tie for third and no playoff for second place.  Lots of sports competitions have a built-in third-place game and never have a second-place game, because the standard single-elimination format never leaves second place in doubt.  If our triple-elimination format also never leaves second place in doubt, what is the problem?

I don't think the lack of a playoff for second/third should be an argument against the proposed format until such time as the format gets it clearly wrong, i.e. the format gives second place to someone who clearly performed worse than the third-place finisher.

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Janzert on Oct 20th, 2014, 11:19am
Once I started writing the modified rule out and realizing that defining it as "reverse order of elimination" seemed like the natural way to state it, then the playoff game just for third place feels fine as well.

The modified version is now in the rules (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/mwiki/index.php/2015_World_Championship_Rules#Final_player_ranking). Let me know if I got something wrong.

Janzert

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Janzert on Oct 20th, 2014, 2:28pm
One more thing I don't believe has had any discussion but has crossed my mind a few times. I think it might be established enough now to switch out WHRH (http://home.scarlet.be/~woh/whr/whrh.htm) for WHRE (http://home.scarlet.be/~woh/whr/whre.htm) in the seeding formula.

Of the finalists last year only one (odin73) does not currently have at least 20 event games, and in the top 30 there are only 3 (adding RmznA and ikalyoncu).

Janzert

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Janzert on Oct 24th, 2014, 6:25pm
Since it came up in the chatroom and looking back it appears I've never actually posted a confirmation. I will be able to take on the tournament director position again this year. Omar has also given his approval for me to do so.

Janzert

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Fritzlein on Oct 25th, 2014, 1:03am

on 10/24/14 at 18:25:42, Janzert wrote:
Since it came up in the chatroom and looking back it appears I've never actually posted a confirmation. I will be able to take on the tournament director position again this year. Omar has also given his approval for me to do so.

Janzert

This is excellent news for the Arimaa community!  (I didn't celebrate earlier because I didn't stop to think what would have happened if you were unable or unwilling to be TD again. <shudders>)

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Janzert on Oct 28th, 2014, 1:06pm

on 10/20/14 at 14:28:31, Janzert wrote:
I think it might be established enough now to switch out WHRH (http://home.scarlet.be/~woh/whr/whrh.htm) for WHRE (http://home.scarlet.be/~woh/whr/whre.htm) in the seeding formula.


So the feeling I'm getting from here and the chatroom is that no one cares in either direction on this, or possibly I've burned everyone out on rule changes. ;)

I'm pretty much right on the cusp between WHRE has the coverage needed and give it one more year so we can get a data point from the WC to check if it has enough coverage.

Janzert

Title: Re: 2015 Championship changes
Post by Janzert on Nov 2nd, 2014, 9:43pm
Given that I have no strong feeling either way I decided to leave it the same for now and stuck with WHRH.

Unless something else comes up I think the rules are now finished for this year.

Janzert



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