Different tournaments have different characteristics. Swiss is excellent at resolving the stronger and weaker players but it's not so good as a general ranking procedure.
The reason I built a simulator long ago was that I wanted to find a way to determine who the best player is from a pool of players, in order to improve my chess and my go program using learning algorithms. The problem is how to do this with the least amount of effort. If you have many players and want to find the best and their ratings are unknown, there are probably statistical methods to do this most efficiently based on finding the pairing with the most information return. But a SIMPLE way I found was to play a knockout tournament where the number of games (per pairing) increased with the round. In my simulations I could find the best player a high percentage of the time with relatively few games. Round robin is orders of magnitude more expensive for this if the number of rounds is very high. The knockout tournament is a "divide and conquer" algorithm, so it should not be surprising that ti's efficient. If the goal for a tournament is to (relatively) reliably find the best player with the fewest number of games, it should be a knockout tournament where you play more and more games as you advance. But this is a horrible choice for most tournaments, especially for human tournaments, because if you lose you go home. Not much fun :-) Don On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 7:44 AM, Petri Pitkanen <[email protected]>wrote: > > > 2011/5/9 Nick Wedd <[email protected]> > >> You are proposing that the tournament should start by pairing strong >> players with weak players, and claiming that this is more likely to result >> in the strongest player winning the tournament. I don't see it. >> >> > Maybe itis easier if you think Swiss system as a cup. Which it for > winners (assuming number of rounds being like 5 rounds for 32 players). If > you pair strong players with strong ones, on second round you end having > players still contending of winning that are both weak and strong. And some > strong players dropped to competing for third place effectively. > > Swiss system is a cup with kinda consolation being played by the losers. > > And you have reliable a priori information then swiss is not not the best > choice. MacMahon gets better results. Not fair for quickly advancinf players > but nothing is perfect. > > You could simulate this easily by assuming that win probabilities follow > exactly ELO estimates for example. > > Petri > > _______________________________________________ > Computer-go mailing list > [email protected] > http://dvandva.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/computer-go >
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