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Simulating competitiveness and precision in a tournament structure: a reaper tournament system

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Abstract

This paper explores a new perspective of finding the best tournament structures by focusing on two aspects (apart from the number of matches): competitiveness development and ranking precision. Competitiveness development emphasizes the importance of participants’ motivation while keeping the matches exciting whereas ranking precision reflects the persuasiveness of tournament result to its participants. To address competitiveness development, this paper proposes a new method that visualizes tournament structures using a tree-like graphical model called progress tree. In addition, ranking precision is addressed by considering the similarities and qualities of the ranking process by the sorting algorithm during the ranking process. With respect to these two aspects, several well-known tournament structures such as the single elimination, double elimination, Round-Robin, and Swiss systems were analyzed. Although each tournament has its own pros and cons, none of them can thoroughly convince all participants of the tournament results while keeping the matches strongly motivating. As such, a new tournament structure called Reaper tournament system with its variants, are proposed. The Reaper tournament system with its variants were evaluated on simulated football matches and validated with real-world data of previous football tournaments. Thence, practical insights into tournament structures are obtained and possible future works are discussed.

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Notes

  1. http://www.uefa.com/uefaeuro/.

  2. http://www.fifa.com/fifa-tournaments/archive/worldcup/.

  3. In this paper we assume that a match can only result in a win or a loss.

  4. http://www.algolist.net/Algorithms/Sorting.

  5. http://dac.dota2.com.cn/statistical/main.htm.

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Acknowledgements

This research is funded by a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, in the framework of the Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research (Grant Number: 19K22893).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Science in Ho Chi Minh city, 227 Nguyen Van Cu, District 5, Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam

    An Vinh Nguyen Dinh

  2. Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 1-1 Asahidai, Nomi, 923-1292, Japan

    Nhien Pham Hoang Bao, Mohd Nor Akmal Khalid & Hiroyuki Iida

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  1. An Vinh Nguyen Dinh
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  2. Nhien Pham Hoang Bao
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  3. Mohd Nor Akmal Khalid
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  4. Hiroyuki Iida
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Correspondence to Mohd Nor Akmal Khalid.

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Dinh, A.V.N., Bao, N.P.H., Khalid, M.N.A. et al. Simulating competitiveness and precision in a tournament structure: a reaper tournament system. Int. j. inf. tecnol. 12, 1–18 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41870-019-00397-5

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