Tuesday, August 10, 2010

[aetkgafu] Round robin bracket sampling

First play a round robin tournament (though swiss is possible).  After the tournament is completed, each player is given a seed at random into a single elimination tournament.  We play a "virtual" single-elimination tournament using the results of the round-robin tournament to determine the winner.  If draw, or the players did not meet, then a coin flip decides the outcome.

The goal is to eliminate the chances of collusion between players which is possible in a round-robin, but still allow every player to play each round.  Not knowing what the bracket will be, players should attempt to play well in every game, for it may be one of the log(n) games which "count".

A more sophisticated version exhaustively enumerates all possible brackets (n!/2^n, I think) and coin flip (if necessary) results, and awards prizes according to probability of winning the virtual single-elimination.  This might not (probably won't) prevent collusion.

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