Related papers: Maximising common fixtures in a round robin tourna…
Applications such as employees sharing office spaces over a workweek can be modeled as problems where agents are matched to resources over multiple rounds. Agents' requirements limit the set of compatible resources and the rounds in which…
Winning the coin toss at the end of a tied soccer game gives a team the right to choose whether to kick either first or second on all five rounds of penalty kicks, when each team is allowed one kick per round. There is considerable evidence…
A common format for sports contests involves pairwise matches between two teams, with the #1 player of team A matched against the #1 player of team B, the #2 player of team A against the #2 player of team B, and so on. This paper addresses…
Given a mapping from a set of players to the leaves of a complete binary tree (called a seeding), a knockout tournament is conducted as follows: every round, every two players with a common parent compete against each other, and the winner…
During the last twenty years, a lot of research was conducted on the sport elimination problem: Given a sports league and its remaining matches, we have to decide whether a given team can still possibly win the competition, i.e., place…
The traveling tournament problem (TTP) is to minimize the total traveling distance of all teams in a double round-robin tournament. In this paper, we focus on TTP-2, in which each team plays at most two consecutive home games and at most…
This paper explores a novel way for analyzing the tournament structures to find a best suitable one for the tournament under consideration. It concerns about three aspects such as tournament conducting cost, competitiveness development and…
We study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…
League competition is investigated using random processes and scaling techniques. In our model, a weak team can upset a strong team with a fixed probability. Teams play an equal number of head-to-head matches and the team with the largest…
We revisit a well-known divide-and-conquer maximin recurrence $f(n) = \max(\min(n_1,n_2) + f(n_1) + f(n_2))$ where the maximum is taken over all proper bipartitions $n = n_1+n_2$, and we present a new characterization of the pairs…
In many professional sports leagues, teams from opposing leagues/conferences compete against one another, playing inter-league games. This is an example of a bipartite tournament. In this paper, we consider the problem of reducing the total…
The bipartite traveling tournament problem (BTTP) addresses inter-league sports scheduling, which aims to design a feasible bipartite tournament between two $n$-team leagues under some constraints such that the total traveling distance of…
The selection of an appropriate competition format is critical for both the success and credibility of any competition, both real and simulated. In this paper, the automated parallelism offered by the RoboCupSoccer 2D simulation league is…
This paper considers the challenge of designing football group draw mechanisms which have the uniform distribution over all valid draw assignments, but are also entertaining, practical, and transparent. We explain how to simulate the FIFA…
We consider a general round-robin tournament model with equally strong players in which $X_{ij}$ denotes the score of player $i$ against player $j$. We assume that $X_{ij}$ takes values in a countable subset of $[0,1]$ and satisfies…
The group draw of a sports tournament requires assigning teams to groups of (almost) the same size. The most important criteria for a draw procedure are balance, randomness, and transparency, which could not be satisfied simultaneously if…
A tournament $H$ is said to force quasirandomness if it has the property that a sequence $(T_n)_{n\in \mathbb{N}}$ of tournaments of increasing orders is quasirandom if and only if the homomorphism density of $H$ in $T_n$ tends to…
We study a sequential decision-making model where a set of items is repeatedly matched to the same set of agents over multiple rounds. The objective is to determine a sequence of matchings that either maximizes the utility of the least…
In the symmetric rendezvous problem two players follow the same (randomized) strategy to visit one of $n$ locations in each time step $t=0,1,2,\dots$. Their goal is to minimize the expected time until they visit the same location and thus…
The group stage of a sports tournament is often made more appealing by introducing additional constraints in the group draw that promote an attractive and balanced group composition. For example, the number of intra-regional group matches…