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Re: Re: a challenge/problem.

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg40157] Re: [mg40137] Re: a challenge/problem.
• From: Dr Bob <drbob at bigfoot.com>
• Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 04:12:43 -0500 (EST)
• References: <b56hga$bve$1@smc.vnet.net> <b5efij$651$1@smc.vnet.net> <200303221008.FAA22742@smc.vnet.net>
• Reply-to: drbob at bigfoot.com
• Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

Paul,

Perhaps I'm missing something, but these graphs seem to contain no 
information about how games are arranged in time.  They merely record the 
results, in terms of who beat whom in each possible pairing.  Nor are 
"score sequences" of any use for laying out a tournament, despite the term 
"sequence" that sometimes indicates ordering or chronology (but not in this 
case).

So... I'm not sure I can agree that these are graphical representations of 
tournaments.

I am in favor of Swiss system tournaments (commonly used in Chess matches), 
rather than the exhaustive (and inefficient) tournaments we're talking 
about here.

Swiss system tournaments match up roughly comparable opponents in each 
round, so that at the end, we don't have controversies about how tough each 
team's schedule was.  The result would be NBA or football playoffs that 
include the best teams.  The down-sides are (1) that the schedule couldn't 
be determined before the season begins, and (2) by mid-season, losers would 
be playing losers, so those games would probably be canceled if ticket 
sales are the goal.

The latter is a down-side only for losing teams, however --- but a big plus 
for fans.

Bobby

On Sat, 22 Mar 2003 05:08:30 -0500 (EST), Paul Abbott 
<paul at physics.uwa.edu.au> wrote:

> Simon wrote:
>
>> I've got a puzzle, im not sure how to solve, a friend of mine asked
>> me to make a program that given a number of teams (which must be more
>> than 4 but other than that just dividable by 2) - now, there is
>> teams\2 matches in a round, and no team must play more than 1 match
>> in a round (making the number of rounds teams-1).
>
> There is a Mathematica Notebook at
>
> http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Tournament.html
>
> which gives graphical (pun intended) representations of tournaments.
> Cheers,
> Paul
>



-- 
majort at cox-internet.com
Bobby R. Treat

• References:
  • Re: a challenge/problem.
    • From: Paul Abbott <paul@physics.uwa.edu.au>