Swiss Tournament Automatic Generator

[vhabgood]

Greeting All,

I would have posted this under the software/computing section of this forum, however I don't think it would have been seen by my intended audience. I have developed some software (text-based currently) that will automatically run a tournament. The only thing the user would have to input is the scores for each player after each round and the names of everyone initially. You can either run the tournament in swiss-style or round-robin. It allows you to input the number of re-pairing rounds as well. If anyone is interested in trying it out please let me know. The executable file size is only 161kB currently. Email vhagood@gmail.com. I plan on releasing the software for free under the GNU General Public License. Any improvements you think need to make please let me know. The goal is to help assist people run tournaments in a fair fashion with less stress. This could be beneficial to tournament referees who also plan on playing in the tournament. Merry Christmas to all!

Your Friend,
Victor C. Habgood II

[tommyc]

Nice one Victor................appreciated/

[john reade]

Victor, Can you explain how your program will choose pairings from players with equal scores? John.

[vhabgood]

Victor, Can you explain how your program will choose pairings from players with equal scores? John.

Sure. Basically, I used a random number generator that will randomize the selection between equal scores. It will always start with the top scoring player and work down to find a suitable opponent. If it is a round where re-pairing is acceptable, then the next highest scoring player will be chosen as the opponent (barring the situation we just previously talked about). If re-pairing is not acceptable, then it will continue to work through the list to find the next highest suitable opponent. Fairly simple algorithm that we already use. The only difference is using a random number sequence instead of drawing names or cards out of a hat or something similar. Hope this explains it!

-Vic

[MostFamousDane]

Technically a regular PC is not able to generate true random numbers

[vhabgood]

Technically a regular PC is not able to generate true random numbers

True. Some interesting articles published in the IEEE and ACM journals about this topic. However, for our intents and purposes, I believe it will suffice far better than the "hat" method or the "pick a card" method. I am open to suggestions though if someone can think of a better way of course!

-vic

[MostFamousDane]

Well poker site typically have a box attached that measures radiation to generate true random numbers. You could use a service like http://www.random.org/#tools to get a true random number but that would probably be a bit over the top

[Alex_Moiseyev]

Victor, keep in mind - sometimes opening drawing is not 100% random process. For instance we may have restircitions of "not repeated openings" etc - depends of organisers requirements.

[vhabgood]

Victor, keep in mind - sometimes opening drawing is not 100% random process. For instance we may have restircitions of "not repeated openings" etc - depends of organisers requirements.

As of right now, I have not created anything to issue the openings. However, I guess I should have (should take an hour or so). I will include it and let the user have a chance to input whether they want the software to determine the openings or not. I will work on implementing the flexibility for this as you have mentioned. Thanks!

-vic

[vhabgood]

Well poker site typically have a box attached that measures radiation to generate true random numbers. You could use a service like http://www.random.org/#tools to get a true random number but that would probably be a bit over the top

This is embedded software, so we would need an embedded type of solution. However, I have chatted with John Acker about possibly creating a webpage to do the same thing. Should take a little longer to develop, but this type of solution would be perfect for that (not by measuring radiation, but something like using a micro-controller and a barometric pressure sensor to seed the generator would be perfectly practical).

[vhabgood]

It would be interesting to play with difficulty levels within the 3-move generator. I think there's a ranked opening list somewhere, and I expect it'd be easy to tell the script to pick a top-20% difficulty opening for later rounds, or for the top competitors.

Nice idea. I will try to make it as flexible as possible to allow for future changes/discussions without having to revise. Definitely brings up some interesting ideas. We could seriously track statistics over the course of a couple of years with wins/losses on specific openings and perhaps spawn modified rules for serious tournaments.

[Alex_Moiseyev]

ACF TOUGH DECK - 80 openings. It is even on this forum back to 2006 when me, Gene Lindsay and Mac Banks developed it. It was approved by ACF and used in 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2012 3-moves National

[vhabgood]

It would be interesting to play with difficulty levels within the 3-move generator. I think there's a ranked opening list somewhere, and I expect it'd be easy to tell the script to pick a top-20% difficulty opening for later rounds, or for the top competitors.

Done! As of tonight, everything appears to be working great. I will run some more black box tests tomorrow. So, unless someone else has something they wish for me to add, I am done! Anyone who wishes to try out the software and help find bugs or issues is more than welcome. Happy holidays!

-vic

[Travis Weddle]

I can help test if you want.

[Jason Solan]

Greeting All,

I would have posted this under the software/computing section of this forum, however I don't think it would have been seen by my intended audience. I have developed some software (text-based currently) that will automatically run a tournament. The only thing the user would have to input is the scores for each player after each round and the names of everyone initially. You can either run the tournament in swiss-style or round-robin. It allows you to input the number of re-pairing rounds as well. If anyone is interested in trying it out please let me know. The executable file size is only 161kB currently. Email vhagood@gmail.com. I plan on releasing the software for free under the GNU General Public License. Any improvements you think need to make please let me know. The goal is to help assist people run tournaments in a fair fashion with less stress. This could be beneficial to tournament referees who also plan on playing in the tournament. Merry Christmas to all!

Your Friend,
Victor C. Habgood II

Very nice Vic!
Releasing under GPL, are you planning on hosting on google code or anything like that? What are you using to store the information when the program closes? Flat file, xml, or maybe sqlite db?

After a couple of e-mails I received this week it looks like I might be able to add a feature to help with initial pairings.
It looks like from the hard work of JR and John I might FINALLY have access to a full ACF roster.
And with the work of Joe and Eric we now have ratings regularly updated again.

I will add a web service to enable a lookup of a player and their rating, which we can hopefully hook into your tournament generator. Or make the ratings available via a download which we can merge into the program. I'm pretty sure Eric uses ELO so we potentially could show "unofficial" rating changes real-time..... but perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. I just see great possibilities.