Talk:Tournament Specification Ideas

Can you give a brief explanation of Step Ladder, League, Poker, and Ladder tournaments are?

Step ladder is the ultimate bye system. Say you have four robots. The fourth seed plays the third seed, the winner of that match plays the second seed, and the winner of that match plays the first seed.

League/Division is like American Football's regular season. There you play everyone in your division twice, everyone in the other division of your league once, and a few people from the other league (That might not be precisely right, but it's the general idea).

The poker tournament I was thinking of is where everyone is grouped into matches (tables), which are run simultaneously. As soon as enough people lose, the players are regrouped into new tables. So elimination is done by time rather than score.

A ladder tournament is where everyone has a standing. You can generally challenge another player one or two steps above you. If the lower player wins, the two players swap places in the standings. In a points system, the winner gets a certain percentage of the other player's points, and standings are redone based on points.

League
Might want to check out the Wikipedia article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_Season_%28NFL%29

I think this class of tournament might be too complicated, because of the rotating schedules on a 3 year cycle.

Load Lists
Should the tournament be able to handle custom load lists of some kind? so that robots could be positioned? Say you wanted a tournament where the two robots faced each other from opposite sides. Or 1 robot in each corner.

Yes to load lists
We should definately have something for specific load lists. We need to think about how we are going to specify matches, because we will want to be able to do things outside a present load list, like differing arena sizes for differing numbers of robots, or even the old Random Environment Contest.

In terms of matches specifiable for each round, I was thinking it might be useful, but didn't have a specific idea for it. Is there a reason not to allow it?

Another thing I was thinking we might want to cover is each robot having it's own match definition. I was thinking of this in terms of a league system, where each robot has it's home arena, for home field advantage.

Tournament Types
Been thinking about different tournaments for real sports. Most are based on a 1v1 setup. And the only reason I think they are split up into the different tournament types is because of time. If the NFL football season were long enough I think they would do a round robin instead if what they currently do. So most tournaments seem to be formated as a way to reduce the number of games required to find a winner, and depending on the game, some might be more fair than others. But I don't know how well that applies to RB, since most of the time, we could run all the possible combinations. Also, running the same match a second time would have little benefit I think since the results are not likely to change since the number of games in the match should be set high enough to remove random luck.

BTW, the only sports/events I can think of that match an All In approach are racing and poker/card games. For racing I can't find a clear definition of how "heats" might be arranged or the rules for moving forward, so I think it might vary from race to race. Track and field are where that is relavent since some races might be limited to 8. So with 16 runners, you might take the top four from the first two heats to run in the final race. But then, what would you do with 24 runners? Have three races of 8, and then using the times, take the top 8 to race in the final?