Related papers: The Swiss Gambit
The International Chess Federation (FIDE) imposes a voluminous and complex set of player pairing criteria in Swiss-system chess tournaments and endorses computer programs that are able to calculate the prescribed pairings. The purpose of…
The Swiss-system is an increasingly popular competition format as it provides a favourable trade-off between the number of matches and ranking accuracy. However, there is no empirical study on the potential unfairness of Swiss-system chess…
Tournaments are a widely used mechanism to rank alternatives in a noisy environment. This paper investigates a fundamental issue of economics in tournament design: what is the best usage of limited resources, that is, how should the…
The paper suggests a family of paired comparison-based scoring procedures for ranking the participants of a Swiss system chess team tournament. We present the challenges of ranking in Swiss system, the features of individual and team…
Chess championships are often organised as a Swiss-system tournament, causing great challenges in ranking the participants due to the different strength of schedules and possible circular triads. The paper suggests that pairwise comparison…
Inspired by the increasing popularity of Swiss-system tournaments in sports, we study the problem of predetermining the number of rounds that can be guaranteed in a Swiss-system tournament. Matches of these tournaments are usually…
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…
Gambits are central to human decision-making. Our goal is to provide a theory of Gambits. A Gambit is a combination of psychological and technical factors designed to disrupt predictable play. Chess provides an environment to study gambits…
In the last decades we have witnessed the success of applications of Artificial Intelligence to playing games. In this work we address the challenging field of games with hidden information and card games in particular. Jass is a very…
The Labouchere gambling system is hypothesized to increase the probability of winning a predetermined arbitrary profit in a gambling system such as a coin flip or a roulette game in which both payouts and odds are 1:1. However, use of the…
In J. Schwenk.(2018) ['What is the Correct Way to Seed a Knockout Tournament?' Retrieved from The American Mathematical Monthly], Schwenk identified a surprising weakness in the standard method of seeding a single elimination (or knockout)…
Knockout tournaments, also known as single-elimination or cup tournaments, are a popular form of sports competitions. In the standard probabilistic setting, for each pairing of players, one of the players wins the game with a certain (a…
Pairwise comparison matrices are widely used in Multicriteria Decision Making. This article applies incomplete pairwise comparison matrices in the area of sport tournaments, namely proposing alternative rankings for the 2010 Chess Olympiad…
We revisit the well-studied problem of designing fair and manipulation-resistant tournament rules. In this problem, we seek a mechanism that (probabilistically) identifies the winner of a tournament after observing round-robin play among…
The paper discusses the strategy-proofness of sports tournaments with multiple group stages, where the results of matches already played in the previous round against teams in the same group are carried over. These tournaments, widely used…
We consider the manipulability of tournament rules which map the results of $\binom{n}{2}$ pairwise matches and select a winner. Prior work designs simple tournament rules such that no pair of teams can manipulate the outcome of their match…
Competitor rating systems for head-to-head games are typically used to measure playing strength from game outcomes. Ratings computed from these systems are often used to select top competitors for elite events, for pairing players of…
We study a stochastic process that mimics single-game elimination tournaments. In our model, the outcome of each match is stochastic: the weaker player wins with upset probability q<=1/2, and the stronger player wins with probability 1-q.…
This paper discusses the effects of social learning in training of game playing agents. The training of agents in a social context instead of a self-play environment is investigated. Agents that use the reinforcement learning algorithms are…
Strategic decision-making in uncertain and adversarial environments is crucial for the security of modern systems and infrastructures. A salient feature of many optimal decision-making policies is a level of unpredictability, or randomness,…