new tournament management software

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Re: new tournament management software

Post by BeligerAnt »

Nice to see someone else trying to make the organisers' lives a bit easier ;)

I've only had a quick play with it, but a few things spring to mind:
1. Need to be able to save progress at ANY point. The last thing you want is a crash after 118 of 119 fights!
2. Need an "undo" or "redo" feature so that the result of a fight can be changed. Human error will ensure that the wong robot is selected at some point. The declared winner has also been known to change some time after the end of a fight :roll:
3. There appears to be a repeat fight at the end of each group. It doesn't work like that at the group stages. You simply end up with a group winner (from the winners stream) and a group runner up (from the losers stream). The repeat fight (which is optional, depending on who wins!) only occurs for the grand final.
4. The Add/remove drivers list seemed to populate OK, but the robots list was empty. Not too sure what these lists allow you to do?
5. It seems the only way to change the entries is by editing the original text file from the website. It's not the most user-friendly experience! This is an essential feature as robot names, drivers and (especially) clusters change right up to (and beyond!) the start of the competition.
6. The cryptic unlabelled top-right drop-down box must be used to select between an ant or flea competition - had us confused for a while :)
7. Some navigation/labelling would be nice, as it's a bit confusing to scroll around between the groups/rounds without any text prompts.
8. Output of results in a simple tabular form as PDF or HTML for upload to a web site.

(Note I have not tried the latest version, so apologies if any of these have already been fixed)

With regards to fights repeating, the algorithm in AntLog has been improved from PeterW's original to minimise the possiblity of fights repeating. It's not perfect, as the only real solution is to swap robots between groups, but then this leads to drivers fighting themselves which is even less desirable! If anyone can come up with a sound algorithm to avoid this without creating chaos along the way, I'd be pleased to hear about it!
As to clusters of fights between the same people in the last 16, well that's just a consequence of the same people getting multiple robots to the final stages :) There are not too many options when one person has four of the eight "winners" in the final group!

Although this is clearly moving in the right direction, I don't think it should be used alone for the AWS. It really requires a *lot* more development and thorough testing. I'd be happy to give it a try at SAC in April as it's a much smaller and less formal event, and the code has a chance of reaching a stable and well-tested state by then.
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Re: new tournament management software

Post by Remote-Controlled Dave »

Would it be worth maybe running this new system alongside the AntLog at the AWS? Using the same set of results? That would be a good way to see if any bugs develop on the new system that don't appear on the AntLog
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Re: new tournament management software

Post by Andrew_Hibberd »

Having another small play with the v2 software to add to Gary's comments:

1) The ant list doesn't seem dynamic, by adding a new robot I didn't seem to get a new group etc.
2) Colours could be more obvious as the fights are typically not in order
3) Pop up boxes of fights could be closer to the mouse pointer as this may be used without a mouse at the comp, lots of moving is annoying
4) May be the terrible laptop I am using but the mouse over the box blinks then takes about a second to come back
5) Need a back button to go back to the group stages, its hard to check if the groups have been calculated correctly
6) A possible print out of results would be nice for all robots at the end

I also agree with Gary that we should stick to the trusted methods until this have been proven to work
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Re: new tournament management software

Post by mTubes »

1. Need to be able to save progress at ANY point. The last thing you want is a crash after 118 of 119 fights!
2. Need an "undo" or "redo" feature so that the result of a fight can be changed. Human error will ensure that the wong robot is selected at some point. The declared winner has also been known to change some time after the end of a fight
Great, thanks - it hadn't occurred to me how important these tools would be - I'll start working on these ASAP. Would an auto-save system be a good idea, or would be better to have the user explicitly ask it save?
3. There appears to be a repeat fight at the end of each group. It doesn't work like that at the group stages. You simply end up with a group winner (from the winners stream) and a group runner up (from the losers stream). The repeat fight (which is optional, depending on who wins!) only occurs for the grand final.
Ah, I didn't know this, thanks. I'll remove the extra fight. Without the repeat, how do you decide who is the winner and who is the runner-up if they've both lost one fight at the end of the final? is it just a case of the winner of the final is the winner of the group?
4. The Add/remove drivers list seemed to populate OK, but the robots list was empty. Not too sure what these lists allow you to do?
5. It seems the only way to change the entries is by editing the original text file from the website. It's not the most user-friendly experience! This is an essential feature as robot names, drivers and (especially) clusters change right up to (and beyond!) the start of the competition.
To populate the list of robots, you have to double-click on a driver, and it will bring up their robots. I wanted to bind this to single-click instead of double to avoid this confusion, but unfortunately the caused the robots list to refresh before updating the selected driver - this meant that the list of robots would always be one selection behind whichever driver you had selected - confusing, to say the least :roll: . Again, I'll try and make it clear what the various part of the UI are for, and hopefully solve this issue. Once it works, this screen is the only way to change the robots and drivers that are listed to compete - I'll look into making it possible to change entries after the tournament has been generated, but that's quite a complicated problem.
6. The cryptic unlabelled top-right drop-down box must be used to select between an ant or flea competition - had us confused for a while
Yeah... again, my bad UI design at fault. I'll try and clear this - and lots of other badly labelled things - up soon. I'll also make a guide on how to use it & set up a tournament, once I'm more confident the layout isn't going to drastically change any time soon.
7. Some navigation/labelling would be nice, as it's a bit confusing to scroll around between the groups/rounds without any text prompts.
Hopefully this is partly resolved in the new version - it now labels each group. If it's still lacking in clarity, please let me know what sort of thing needs to be labelled better, and I'll see what I can do.
8. Output of results in a simple tabular form as PDF or HTML for upload to a web site.
This is a great idea, I'll look into finding a way of doing this. Unfortunately, IIRC, .pdf is a proprietary file-type, so I don't think I'll be able to export to it without paying a lot of money to adobe, so that's kind of out of the question. HTML is definitely an option, however, but I'm terrible when it comes to HTML so I'll have to read up on it a bit. Another idea that's just occurred to me is that I might well be able to export to an openOffice spreadsheet file, but again I'll have to look into it more to know how feasible that is. At the very least, I can definitely get it to export as text file, as that's probably how I'll deal with the save/load system.
Would it be worth maybe running this new system alongside the AntLog at the AWS? Using the same set of results? That would be a good way to see if any bugs develop on the new system that don't appear on the AntLog
This sounds like a good idea to me, but it would mean a lot of work for whoever is running it. There's also the as-yet unresolved issue that my software doesn't arrange the loser's bracket fights very well, so it would end up with my program saying one fight should happen, and AntLog asking for another (better) fight. I think this is biggest issue my program has right now, so I'll try and sort this as soon as I can. Once I get a chance I'll play around with AntLog, so that I understand how it deals with it.

As I said in my first post, I don't want this to be used at the AWS unless it works - the last thing I want to be responsible for such a massive cock-up. Currently, it's definitely not in a state where I'd be happy for it be used, even it was running alongside AntLog. However, it would be nice if I can get it to that state in the next week, because from my point of view, the best way to know what needs to be improved is to actually run it in a real situation. I'll keep updating as much as I can - if it's usable by the AWS, then that's nice, but being realistic, I think it's unlikely.

Again, thanks for all the feedback. :D


Edit: - I missed andrew's comment. To answer the things he's mentioned:
1) The ant list doesn't seem dynamic, by adding a new robot I didn't seem to get a new group etc.
Sorry, but I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. It ought to create as many groups as are needed for number of entries - if it's not doing this correctly, could you give me a little more detail on how to reproduce the problem, please?
3) Pop up boxes of fights could be closer to the mouse pointer as this may be used without a mouse at the comp, lots of moving is annoying
Yeah, this has been bothering me, too. The window manager I'm using should be able to sort this, but I'll have to look into how exactly to do so. I'm considering trying to integrate the buttons into the main view rather than using a pop-up, but I'm concerned about it getting to cluttered.
4) May be the terrible laptop I am using but the mouse over the box blinks then takes about a second to come back
This is a little surprising, but if it's running slowly then it's my code at fault, I'll try and speed it up a bit. It might well be that the only way to resolve this is to remove the mouse-over highlight, and I'm concerned that doing so might make it more difficult to navigate the whole thing. Maybe that's not a problem though, I'd like to know what people think about that. If nothing else I can probably make it optional, so that there's a way to speed it up a bit on more limited hardware.
5) Need a back button to go back to the group stages, its hard to check if the groups have been calculated correctly
good thinking, I'll add this soon.
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Re: new tournament management software

Post by Andrew_Hibberd »

I added a single robot to the bottom of the text file which showed up in the list of entries but didn't create an extra group.

Typically at the end of the group stages you end up with a winner, a robot that has won all its fights and a second place, a robot that has lost one fight. They do not need to have a group final.

I will try and draw it out fore 8 winners and 8 with one loss winners move right loosers move down. Last fight is only repeated when the robot with no losses looses for the first time.

_______________________ 8 winners fight >______________4 winners>______________2 winners>______ 1winner
___________________________\/___________________________\/____________________\/______________\/
_______________________ 4 loosers____________________ 2 loosers _______________1 looser
8 loosers fight >__________4 loosers >___________________2 loosers >______________1 looser________1 looser >_____________ 1st
__\/ _____________________ \/ ___________________________ \/____________________ \/_____________\/
4 out ____________________4 out_________________________2 out_________________1 out__________(if looser wins replay final)
___________________________________________________________________________3rd_____________2nd
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Re: new tournament management software

Post by BeligerAnt »

All of the group stages and various size finals are perhaps best documented in the charts at:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/g0xan/robo ... -02-27.pdf

The charts are a pictorial representation of the algorithm implemented in AntLog.
...the best way to know what needs to be improved is to actually run it in a real situation.
No, the best way to improve the code is by well-structured testing with carefully chosen test data. A final test could be to take a set of previous results and running them through the code to check that the same results are achieved. Most of the testing should use simulated data that makes it easy to verify that the correct results are achieved.

Auto-save would be nice. I think the ultimate solution would be to build an application on a proper database so that each record was immediately written to disk. The problem is that this is yet another layer of complexity.

PDF can be generated via the open source Ghostscript, but it is probably rather complicated to incorporate with python. Since there are free PDF writers which install as printers it may be possible to simply provide a "Print" option to PDF. An HTML output would be simpler and more convenient.
Something that can easily be uploaded to the web is really useful, and that is one of the reasons for AntLog using OpenOffice.org
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Re: new tournament management software

Post by Remote-Controlled Dave »

Whatever the faults, its good that someone new is giving it a go! So thanks for your interest and efforts.
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Re: new tournament management software

Post by mTubes »

Thanks for link to the charts, but I've actually already looked at those... unfortunately it seems I can't read them correctly :oops:.

I'm sorry if my comment about testing got misconstrued - as I've said before, I don't want this to be used until it's fit to be used. I've been thoroughly testing with test data, and I'm going to carry on doing so (the reason it doesn't run groups correctly is because I've been telling it to do the wrong thing, not because it's not been doing what I tell it to :( ). I meant more that running it in a real situation would hopefully bring up new features that people would like, rather than that I would use an actual competition as time to try and find bugs.

regarding autosave, if people really wanted it, it wouldn't be hard to make it use a MySQL database, either running locally on the machine, or over the internet - there's some very good python modules around for interfacing with MySQL. However, as you said, it adds another layer of complexity. Frankly, I'm not keen to do it, because I think it over complicates the problem.

As for PDF, I was obviously wrong about it not being an option. I've had a look, and there are plenty of python modules around for writing to pdf, so it is do-able. However, it would require anyone using it to install the module, and seeing as you already need to have installed python for my code to work, I think this would be a bit too much hassle. That being said, if PDF export is what you'd like, I can implement it as an option, so that the program will also run without any non-standard modules.

currently, my plan is to use HTML as the main save format. I think it's the best option because it's both useful and simplistic, and if I save it without any styling people can use whatever CSS they like when it comes to putting it online. However, if you think a different filetype would be better, I'll switch to it.

Thank you very much for all the feedback :D - I don't know nearly as much about the competitions or how best to organize them as anyone here does, so I'm keen to get all the advice I can. I'll be uploading a new version this weekend, hopefully it resolves a good few of the problems.
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Re: new tournament management software

Post by teamocean »

Some interesting comments here- I've been speaking to Mark and I would still like to use the new system for the draw as it speeds this up a lot and to use it alongside Antlog to run the competition.

I am also planning to use it for the fleaweight competition at the AWS so that it can be tried with a smaller competition.
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Re: new tournament management software

Post by James »

just been trying out the v2 program and noticed a few things

1. if you have more than 64 robots (currently 67 ants signed up for AWS37) it seems the program creates 9 groups( 4 8-way & 5 7-way) which then causes a problem when you proceed to the final, as the final only has 16 robots in it, but you should have 18 from the group stages. the program seems to just loose the robots from group 9 :o . what it should do(and what antlog does) is allow up to 16 robots in 8 groups so that the final is never more than 16 robots.

2. it may or may not be my computer, but to select the winner of each fight you have to click on empty space in each box, nothing happens if you click on the robot names or the "vs". It would be nice if you could click anywhere in the box.

3. some sort of labels for the different rounds would make it clearer to follow the charts when going across them and make it more obvious what order the fights need to happen in.

it might be more useful to get something that will do the draw, and output the robots in groups for easy entry into antlog for this event, and then maybe work on getting this working as a complete program for future events.

james
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