by ChrisH » Tue Dec 20, 2011 7:18 am
I am going to try and explain what is going on with the game counts. I have talked with one of the devs on IRC and he confirmed that this explanation is accurate.
The match maker is trying to sort the bots, so it would prefer to have a bunch that play more matches to act as landmarks in the rankings.
Think how quicksort works, it picks a pivot value and then partitions the rest of the values into two groups, based on whether they fall on one side of the pivot or the other. During this partitioning step each value is compared to the pivot only once, but the pivot gets compared to every other value. The result is that the values are put in the proper section of the list quickly.
The matchmaking system is trying to do something similar, and the bots that are getting a lot of games are acting as a sort of pivot or landmark for broadly categorizing the other bots more quickly.