[computer-go] A new pairing system idea for CGOS

[Don Dailey]

Hi David,

The top down thing bothers me a little too.  The idea of top down is to
give pairing fairness and preference to the best players first but it
will get less and less fair as you work your way down.

A simple modification is to just start with an available player at
random, then choose best of N candidates where "best" means closest in
rating (or perhaps closest in RANK is better?)

But Swiss is inherently fair and very easy to program.   It is a very
natural mechanism for automatically handling pairings.   Of course there
is a little extra programming effort tracking the status of the current
"tournament", but this is not difficult.   My gut tells me this is just
about as fair as you can get.  

I can also give them artificial initial rankings, if this breaks up any
determinism, but like real swiss tournaments, you usually can't predict
who will meet in the final rounds with any accuracy,  I don't think this
is an issue.

Anyway, I will consider the "votes" I have received.  

- Don
 


On Thu, 2006-10-05 at 14:40 -0700, David Doshay wrote:
> I also think that it is getting too complicated and too hard to
> predict what the system will actually do.
> 
> I fear that too much of a "top down" system will not have
> enough mixing between levels ... but I also fear that I am
> being too much of a critic with too few good ideas for the
> solution.
> 
> Right now my leaning is to just keep using what you used
> before. I felt that the top programs spent a little too much
> time playing the weaker, but so what? Even if I don't learn
> much from those games where my program wins nearly
> 100% of the time, I do learn a great deal from the few cases
> where we loose, and the authors of the weaker programs do
> need to see their programs play the stronger ones.
> 
> Cheers,
> David
> 
> 
> 
> On 5, Oct 2006, at 2:21 PM, Christoph Birk wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 5 Oct 2006, Don Dailey wrote:
> >
> >> While thinking about the problem of a fair pairing system for CGOS, I
> >> think I have discovered an interesting alternative system for fair
> >> pairings ...   turn CGOS into a tournament server!
> >> ...
> >
> > I think this is way too complicated. Also the idea of scoring
> > games that got a 'bye' is really bad. There is no need on a server
> > like CGOS to use a "shortcut" or beeing "fair".
> >
> > I much prefer you last suggestion: pair from the top down.
> > KISS :-)
> >
> > Christoph
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