Final tournament checklist

[Janzert]

Since anything taking more than two steps means I'm likely to forget something, I recently started a checklist to try and make sure nothing is forgotten in the transition from the open competition to the final tournament. I've now committed this to svn and it can be found as .

Please take a look and check if you see any needed steps not yet listed. Also I think I may be missing a few contest organizer's player accounts. These are needed to make sure their submissions are disabled before starting the final tournament.

Janzert

[amstan]

Jeff has 2 accounts, jeff_cameron and j3camero.

We should also be looking at the top 25 round robin(s?).

[jeff.cameron]

Busted. Now I guess I can't win the contest!

Janzert, that looks like a good procedure. I think we should nominate an "operator" who will execute this procedure at the appropriate time. I volunteer, but I think Janzert would also be a great choice since he has had his hands on the system the most lately.

My plan is to be on IRC for a few hours before the deadline, and at least an hour afterwards. I suggest that we have as many admins on deck as possible in the six hours before the deadline to deal with the rush of activity. Not just taking care of the systems, but answering questions from the community and making sure that every forum post gets a lot of attention. I've noticed in the past that the final two hours before the deadline is when the contest breaks the most people's hearts, since many people have trouble getting their submission in on time.

[Janzert]

I would be happy to take care of switching everything over to start the finals. I was planning on writing an email to Jeff about that later this evening.

Regarding the finals pairing, I would rather that we keep whatever it is we are using before the finals start. I do want to do more work on this before then though. But I've been saying that for the last month and a half and keep getting other things bumped into my path that need working on first.

If we aren't going to get enough games for a solid ranking order over all the entries, and there's a pretty good chance we won't, then my current idea is to slowly eliminate the lowest ranks from play. With the cutoff gradually moving up the list until we can get good solid likelihood of superiority separation for all the players left.

Also I'm assuming the cutoff of Nov 27th 23:59 is server time, i.e. central standard time zone?

Janzert

[bocsimacko]

It would be helpful for contestants to know the type of the final tournament (swiss, round-robin, etc). In particular the map/opponent selection procedures are of interest.

Background: I find that some things do not work against low ranked bots as well as they do against the top ones. Since the bot cannot know the name/ranking of its opponent, the best one can do is to optimize for some distribution of opponents. But that's pretty much unknown.