Nablah

Greetings ladies and gentlemen. I have no idea about the status of this tournament, and I have no good news either. Basically earlier I promised to deliver a new scheduling and scoring system that would fit the planned tournament. I had scheduled the design and coding at a certain time, but my plan failed because I was sick for a couple of weeks. After the summer work activities have shot down any additional plans of creating the new system. So in short: the new scheduling and scoring system is not going to happen, not in the foreseeable future. I am extremely sorry if this ruined somebody's plans. If I have the chance to devote time to design and implement the new system, this time I am going to do the work first and then announce it. All the best and happy gaming! I will now proceed to play a short game of CMAK. (Yes, I am a few years behind.)

Almost definitely not. Fortunately we would not be out of work. Chess is a (much more) balanced game, our outcome possibilities would probably not be in the set {0, 1/2, 1}, and the way adaptive scheduling would be done would have an effect on the expected distribution of the outcomes of a scenario. Admitted, the Swiss bridge system on the Wikipedia page seems to be relatively close to what I was thinking; notice that there too, game outcomes are converted to common units called international match points; our equivalent would be the Nabla scores of individual scenarios. The two best players of the first round play against each other, etc. But why I am focusing on this when we have just decided that it's not feasible. I will take a look at the article you sent me. Unfortunately I have to work this weekend; I mean, real work, involving monetary gain.

Ok. Dividing 72 players into 9 sections with 8 players in each section would basically give you 9 winners. Unless we assume that the different sections are equally strong. This is what is to be investigated next. Would an adaptive scheduling policy be out of order? That is, at the beginning schedule only the first round (first scenario), then schedule the second round (second scenario) based on the results of the first round etc. This, combined with result propagation discussed above, might provide some fascinating possibilities. But I understand that it might be difficult to run such a tournament in a reasonable time due to the fact that PBEM can be so slow, especially with participants all over the world. I will reply to the other responses later.

Greetings. It's been a while since I've been here. So long that I have lost my Nabla account password and access to my old email address - hence the modified username. Incidentally I bought CMAK a couple of months ago and have now been playing it occasionally. Had quite a workload for a few years. I am happy to see the tournaments back. The further development of the tournament system stopped when Treeburst155 suddenly went MIA; hope everything is fine with him. Now that we have an active tournament manager we can put the show on the road again. The Nabla system was developed for ranking groups of players that all play against each other. Typically you'd have a number of players in different sections all playing against each other. You would rank the players within each section to choose those that proceed to the final round. In the final round, all those selected players would again play against each other to find the winner of the tournament. I have understood that in the current tournament there would be no second round. If this is the case, then the current version of the system is probably not the best one, since it provides very little information for comparing players in different sections. Thus a modification to the system would be needed. This sounds like an opportunity to do some interesting math and coding, which is fine by me, but would take some time and effort. Therefore, I would appreciate it if WineCape could verify that a different system is really needed before I proceed any further. What kind of a different system could we have? There are many possibilities. I want to make it clear at this point that I am currently not on a first name basis with any of these: while my background is in machine learning and computer science, I am not specialised in ranking systems. Anyway, as for the different possibilities, item response theory has been mentioned in this thread. It seems to have been developed for assessing capabilities of individuals based on tasks, not pairwise competition. Statistical models of pairwise comparison and other methods have been used to learn rankings, for example, in college football. One option is to device a system heuristically based on the current system - as compared to a fully fledged generative probabilistic model and the associated estimation method. The first heuristic idea that came to my mind is the following. Let A > B denote the fact that A played better than B in any scenario in a tournament, where better is defined in terms of the median score. If A > B > C < D, then not only does A gain final points w.r.t. B but also w.r.t. C; however, the chaining would stop at D. The propagation of the score could be weighted in a geometrically decreasing manner: luck plays a role in the game and different scenarios test different skills. The chaining would be taken into account in scheduling the tournament. This kind of a system would have its own side effects due to the assumptions in the system. For example, assume that B played seriously against C with the end result B > C, but would then lose interest with the end result A > B. These battles would imply A > C even though it might well be the case that A played worse than C. However, regardless of whether a heuristic method or a fully specified model is used, the fact is that this is a learning problem, in which we try to learn a ranking from pairwise game results, and you can not learn without assumptions. In a full generative model the assumptions are laid out explicitly so that everybody can see and discuss them. In a heuristic model the assumptions are included somewhere in the system. This does not necessarily mean that a completely probabilistically specified system would be better: it can be much more complicated, more difficult to understand and discuss, intractable (impossible to estimate) and, at the end, just as questionable when it comes to the underlying assumptions. In any case, I am convinced that we will have an electrifying tournament with hopefully a less electrifying scoring system running for you soon.