Good morning Challengers!
It is with sincere regret that we must inform the community that an error has been made during Tournament 2. Thank you to @ScottSchultz and @marvijo for bringing it to our attention.
As some of you might know, we embarked on a more optimized tournament structure, this year, that statistically ensured each bot played against every other bot. For this, we used a covering design. It’s a very interesting part of combinatorial mathematics but I won’t bore you with the details.
Unfortunately, in this pursuit of fairness, the fact that some bots might play more matches than other, was overlooked. This resulted in some bots getting more chances to build up their scores.
Luckily, for Tournament 1, this was not the case as the covering design for 13 participants has an equal amount of matches.
However, it did alter the results for Tournament 2.
Therefore we are happy to announce the corrected Top 4 player for Tournament 2, congratulations @marvijo, @Jesse, @ScottSchultz, @japes. And our sincerest apologies to @ted and @Gilad for this mistake. We will endeavour to never make it again.
For the sake of transparency, we’ve identified the correct combinatorial structure for our tournaments going forward, namely a Balanced Incomplete Block Design. This will ensure that a) every bot plays against every other bot and b) all bots play the same amount of matches. We will be implementing this after the finals since the covering design for 8 players also has an equal amount of matches.
To recalculate Tournament 2’s results, we reverted back to the old way of generating enough matches for each bot against every other bot that there is more than enough chances to face off against everyone. The reason we’re trying to improve this process is that it generates a lot of clusters in AWS and each cluster has an associated cost. For example, we had to run 266 matches to verify Tournament 2’s results instead of the initial 31.
For the finalist, unfortunately, the deadline of 20 September for final bot submissions still stands due to the unmovable Comic Con date. Hopefully all the tweaks and improvements can be done in time.
We thank the community for their continued understanding and support and hope to see you at the finals at Comic Con on 28 September.