Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 14:23:27 11/09/97
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On November 09, 1997 at 16:38:38, Thorsten Czub wrote: >>I have tried to explain thoses things to Mr Van den Herik before >>the beginning of the Tournament. But there was nothing to do, >>his decision was made long before. To justify accelerated pairing, >>he said that there was a real gap between the strongest programs and >>the weakest ones. After the tournament, many games prove it is not >>true (between the parenthesis, the final rankings of the programs): >>Stobor (24 ) won against Fritz 5 (16), Chess Tiger (27) made a draw >>against Dark >> Thought (6) , Chess Guru (14) won against Shredder (3), etc... >>During the tournament, I have heard Mr Marsland himself say to Bruce >>Moreland that the accelerated pairing was not necessary... >> Errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum > >CSTal was in the B group of programs that are not that strong ! >We did not play bad as a program from the low-level-group. this is totally irrelevant. Accelerated pairings is based on one issue, and *only* one issue: how many players and how many rounds. Simple explanation: A Swiss (with no draws) is just like a single elimination tournament, if log2(players) = # of rounds, and if there are no draws. You will have one unique winner. If you have draws, it might not end so cleanly, and we'd generally like to have # of rounds > log2(players). By at least 1, with 2 being even better. With 32 players, log2(32)=5, so five rounds would produce a clear winner with 32 players, no draws. 6 or 7 would allow for multiple draws and still give a winner. With 11 rounds, this was not an issue at all. Accelerated pairings handle the case where there are too few rounds, and if you pair "normally" (IE 32 players 4 rounds), you end up with two players with 4 points if there are no draws. If you accelerate the pairings, and pair the top half and bottom half independently, for the first round, then the top half play amongst themselves and "knock" out players with a chance to tie. This simply encourages the two top finishers to play each other rather than ending up tied and never having met. But with 11 rounds it served no function at all, other than to make the final few rounds nearly meaningless since the front-runners had all played each other by then, and it only remained to be seen if someone else might upset one of them, since they couldn't upset each other again...
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