new tournament management software

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mTubes
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Re: new tournament management software

Post by mTubes »

Ah, sorry about the problems with v3. I've quickly fixed most of the problems, but there might be a few issues left with it. At any rate, I've updated the version in the first post to v3.2.

I've fixed the crash with more than 64 robots, removed driver names from the display, and changed the default group size back to 8. Also, tournament.py should now open correctly.
Mark Pattle
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Re: new tournament management software

Post by Remote-Controlled Dave »

Poor old Mark! Haha, do you regret taking on this project yet? Don't worry, it took us a fair old while to get around double elimination and we knew what these tournaments had to comprise of, whereas you have no first hand experience yet. Looking forward to meeting you at the weekend, and keep up the good work, we do appreciate it!
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Re: new tournament management software

Post by Andrew_Hibberd »

Looking much more like the double elim format this time that we know and love (*cough*)

Not had a full play but it looks like the number of robots in each group isn't working out properly. What it looks like is there are 5 groups of 10, each of which has 3 robots with a bye (65 total). As James said the groups are easier to work out with 8 or less robots, avoiding possible clashes and with a bit of fiddling to get the other bye robots in.

EDIT: I have just had a look at the group generator, that is fantastic. The only thing I would suggest is if there is an odd number to pick out the one lucky bot to get the bye in the first round, in bold perhaps?

I am not too good with shades of blue, some more colours would be easier to work out which fights have been done and are still to be done when punching in results to test the code.

Unfortunately I have a very long list of things that i need to get done on the robots and properly won't have time to do a full test before the weekend, but its really coming along. Good luck in getting the full code running.
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mTubes
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Re: new tournament management software

Post by mTubes »

Ok, I've got a new version of draw.py done. I've decided it would be best to include it as a separate download - again, you can find it on the first post.
Here's a quick summary of the changes:

Group generation changed:-
Default max size moved back to 16, will now always generate groups in binary multiples (2, 4, 8...). This should allow it work much better with AntLog, as AntLog is set up for either a 2, 4, or 8 group final. The max size has been increased, because otherwise it would require 16 groups. It should still reduce the number of repeat driver vs driver situations, because it will now split the entries across 8 groups rather than 5. (It might still create 16 groups, but there'll need to be more than 128 robots before that happens!).
Soon I will add an option to change the default max size, but if you really want to try tweaking it in the mean-time, you can open draw.py in notepad, and change 'GROUP_SIZE = 16' to whatever number you'd prefer. However, strange numbers might mean strange results! I've only tried it with 2, 4, 8, 16 & 32.

Size labels added:-
pretty straightforward - it now numbers each group member, partly just for convenience, but also so that it's easier to see at a glance how big each group is.

A couple of tiny tweaks:-
Probably nothing noticeable, especially since they mainly fix bugs that occurred when running it on Linux. (Incidentally, if anyone wants to try this out on a Mac, it should work - and if not, I'll do my best to fix it.)

As far as the main program goes, I've now got undo and redo working nicely. However, I'm going to wait until I have saving and loading working before uploading a new version of it - hopefully a few other quite big changes as well.
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James
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Re: new tournament management software

Post by James »

just downloaded v3.2 and the draw program and they seem to be much better :)

The draw program seems to work really well, you realised that antlog only uses 2, 4 or 8 groups :)
As far as I can see/tell, the program seems to be doing the draw well, and it seems to mix the robots/teams up well.

I am a bit confused about the logic in the deciding the number of groups though...

For the newants.txt file which has over 64 ants in, it splits them into 8 groups of 9/10 robots each which seems to make sense as that is the only possible way to spit them between 8 groups

When used with 64 robots it splits them up into 4 groups of 16 robots, as the max group size is 16, which may make sense depending on your logic. (8 groups of 8 robots would be better, see my previous post for reasons why)

However when used with 32 robots, it splits them into 8 groups of 4 robots, which would be ok, but using the same logic as above, I would expect it to split them into 2 groups of 16 robots, or maybe 4 groups of 8 robots if it does not use 2 groups?(4 groups of 8 robots would be the best solution here)

Maybe one way to solve this would be to set the number of groups based on the number of robots, something like this:

if the number of robots is between 128 and 32, use 8 groups

if the number of robots is between 32 and 16, use 4 groups

if the number of robots is less that 16, use 2 groups

I don't know if this would be the best way, there may be another way to do it and get the same result, but this is the logic you ideally want for the group sizes.


The reason Antlog only uses 2,4 or 8 groups is so that there are no bye's in the final, the only bye's in the competition are at the beginning of the groups, so it seems to make more sense to get all of the bye's out of the way at an early stage, as otherwise it could be more of an advantage if you were given a bye halfway through the competition.

The tournament program seems to split the robots into any number of groups, it may be an idea to limit that to 2, 4 or 8 (see last point)

The numbers next to each group/robot definitely make it easier to see how may robots are in each group at a glance

As has been mentioned before, maybe different colours for the winners / losers /completed fights instead of different shades of blue, which are difficult to tell apart.

Also if you/Will are planning on running the tournament program alongside antlog(correct me if i'm wrong) at the AWS, it would need to do this so that it would generate the same fights as the draw program/antlog otherwise it will be impossible to follow both of them for the same competiton.

Seems like it will definitly save time at events, which can only be a good thing :)
Last edited by James on Tue Mar 13, 2012 9:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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teamocean
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Re: new tournament management software

Post by teamocean »

James, I believe Mark is currently working on getting the program to generate the same draw as Antlog so that we shouldn't have any issue running them alongside each other at the AWS.

If not, then I will still use the draw generator as it speeds up the process considerably.
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BeligerAnt
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Re: new tournament management software

Post by BeligerAnt »

If anyone's feeling up to the challenge, I figure the best solution would be to integrate the draw automation into AntLog.
AntLog is proven to work, so it would seem to be the logical starting point. Anyone is welcome to improve it!
I don't know if it's possible to use Python within OpenOffice, if not it's a case of trying to implement the draw logic in OO Basic... :o

(Not thinking of this in terms of this AWS, but could be the way forward for the longer term?)
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mTubes
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Re: new tournament management software

Post by mTubes »

Just thought I'd say - I know all's been quiet in this thread for a while now, but I'm still working on it. I'm going through a bit of an overhaul of the UI, so it might be a few more days yet, but there'll be a new version soon.
Mark Pattle
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