2015 Tiltyard Open

Hello again,

Thanks for your patience. I've been working with Sam Schreiber to make additions to the Tiltyard website and prepare for the 2015 Tiltyard Open. We are continuing to write code and sort out technical details, so plans may still change in the next few weeks, but we're now quite confident that we can run the competition on December 4th and 5th as planned.

Day one: Swiss rounds

The Swiss portion of the competition will start at 10 AM PST (6 PM UTC) on December 4 and should take under ten hours. (Time estimates are difficult as the approach we're taking to run this tournament is new and not fully tested, but these should be conservative estimates, barring serious technical difficulties.)

Participants will play ten games in the Swiss rounds; most of these will be played multiple times. These will include games with one, two, and more than two players. Some games will include simultaneous moves. Many games will be either entirely new or new variants of games you're already familiar with.

Players will be automatically matched each round based on the results of previous rounds. For most games, matching will be based primarily on having similar records in the current game, and secondarily on having similar records in the tournament overall. There will also be a factor to reduce repeated rematches of the same players. The tournament scheduling will be performed by the ggp-tournament library, which you can examine if you're interested in the details.

Day two: Finals

The finals will include the four top-scoring competitors from the Swiss portion, and will use a single-elimination format with multiple matches per round. This will start at noon PST (8 PM UTC) on December 5 and should take under seven hours. (It may take significantly less time depending on how the matches go.) All games in this portion will be fixed-sum.

Registration

Player registration will happen on the Tiltyard website, and may be done any time before the start of the competition. If you opt-in to have your player participate on its Tiltyard registration page (using the "Tiltyard Open?" checkbox) and it is online and available at the competition start time, then it will participate in the tournament. (If your player is not online and listed as available -- with a green light -- on Tiltyard when the competition starts, it won't be able to participate. You should make sure Tiltyard can connect with your player well ahead of time.)

I recommend adding information to the player (email and/or website) to help identify the author(s). Only one entry per team is allowed; currently, this is on the honor system.

In addition to registering on Tiltyard, I highly encourage you to RSVP to alandau@cs.stanford.edu with your player name, author name(s), and email address, and any other information about how to contact you during the competition. This gives us a way to let you know if your player is having errors during matches or appears to be offline. This is also a requirement to be eligible for prizes, if I manage to procure them.

Miscellaneous

All games are in GDL (not GDL-II) and include bases and inputs, like the recent international competitions.

If your player becomes unavailable during the competition, it will continue to be scheduled for matches and the server will substitute random moves. Please try to keep an eye on your player if possible.

I reserve the right to enter a player in the competition, but if I do, it won't be permitted to qualify for the finals, only the Swiss portion. (Sam is free to fully participate because he won't know which games are involved until the last possible moment, when it will likely become public information anyway. And of course, last-second changes to players are not recommended.)

There will be some chatroom or other service for participants to talk. I will send out information about this close to the competition time. You can RSVP as recommended above to ensure that you will receive future updates.

Player rankings and qualification for the finals will be based on the total score accumulated across all games played (with some points given for byes).

This means it is nearly always in the player's best interest to maximize their own score, as opposed to the difference between theirs and another opponent's. Of course, some situations may come up near the end of the tournament where a player would in fact be better off taking the other approach; but these would be rare, and players can't currently distinguish between these cases.