[EM] Simple Tournament Proposal

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 22.03.2023 18:54, Forest Simmons wrote:
> Is clone dependence a problem ... teaming or crowding in tournaments?

In one sense, every method might be clone dependent. Suppose that 
playing against, say a positional chess player is draining and requires 
a lot of concentration. Then if you face a particular positional player 
ten times instead of one, it might do such a number on your endurance 
that even though you beat them all, you lose other contests you might 
have won, thus making you lose in the end.

However, if we suppose that A>B always leads to A>B1, A>B2, A>B3 etc., 
then it depends only on the tournament format and not on your endurance 
as a player. Round-robin tournaments where wins count x points, ties 1, 
and losses zero would reduce to Copeland and could have crowding 
problems. Accelerated systems (e.g. Swiss) would probably also be 
vulnerable to the rating strategy that Paul mentioned, although this 
definitely isn't my area of expertise.

I guess that elimination tournaments could also be clone vulnerable - it 
would depend on the seed order. An interesting question would be: what 
property needs to hold for a seed and bye system for the resulting 
elimination tournament to be cloneproof? Does any such rule exist? 
Dealing with byes in particular seems very tricky.

Seed systems also have other requirements, like strong players not 
meeting too early, which could further constrain the field of viable 
systems. While searching, I found this paper, but I have only cursorily 
looked at it: 
http://www.oxfordcroquet.com/tech/knockout3/What_is_the_Correct_Way_to_Seed_a_Knockout_Tournam.pdf

-km