Talk about pushing the deadline farther into the future

[jmcarthur]

In the IRC channel there has been a lot of expressed interest in the contest lasting longer. I am among those interested in extending the contest, although I understand if there might be some hesitance among the admins to succumb to these demands. I'm putting up a poll in the hopes of convincing the admins to extend it!

[iouri_]

I would support it if extra time will be required to implement ELO-like rating system and/or better opponent matching system (matching opponents vs players around their level more frequently).

[Savaron]

Couple more weeks would be great, but a pre-tournament should be done at the original deadline. This way we can figure out if our bots do only work good before but fail huge at the tournament because of reason X.

[aipcaish]

Yes, I would like it to be extended further with better ranking system (like ELO or something) and better opponent matching.

[zeiris]

There are at least two major problems facing the tournament right now:
-very variant ranking makes it impossible to compare bots closer than ~50 ranks apart
-huge amount of randombots increases variance of ranking and makes it harder to judge overall performance of real bots

Currently, the benefits of letting the contest run (the learning and teaching that result) outweigh the fairly empty benefit of randomly determining a "winner".

As well, from a more idealistic viewpoint, the point of tournaments like these is to hopefully advance technology and thinking, and maybe even discover some new techniques (or new ways of applying old ones!) With the current ranking system, we can't tell if that's happened. I realize everyone involved is doing so on their own time out of goodwill, but extending the tourney and using that time to improve the system to keep up with the improved bots seems like the best thing to do.

[aramadia]

Agree with fixing the broken scoring system

[Maxime81]

The contest is planned to be finished February 26 and we must have scheduled our work on our bot to be on time. We mustn't change that only 3 days before the deadline... It's part of the challenge ! (I know this contest since 8-9 days only)

We want the results !


Nevertheless, It would be great if we could continue to use the website after the results.

[Accoun_]

only 41% agnust 1 week overtime

[jmcarthur]

With the latest server mishaps (unjust timeouts and such) I'd say it would be not only a good idea to extend the deadline a bit but actually unfair not to do so and fix these issues so we can test our bots on a working server and know they will work. As it stands now, I have absolutely no idea what the quality of my entry is or whether it will even make it through the final tournament without being suspended.

[jmcarthur]

Can any admins comment? Is this just a pipe dream?