Finally we don't have to wonder about the correct pronounciation of Continuous Completathlon any more. The name has changed and so has the website location:

Info about the Tour de Little Golem

For the records: I made 2 slight changes to the rules:

- Points wil be divided between players in cases of a tie. Reason: not giving an incentive for quick draws in 2 player finals.

- Ranking points stay valid until the same game's tournament in the next cicle is FINISHED (as opposed to started). Reason: with the original version there might never be a moment at which the ranking is actually reflecting results of all games. That's in direct contradiction to the spirit of the whole thing.

Last chance to vote for the 2nd round game today. I'll close that poll tomorrow.

A poll for the 3rd round will start immediatly after that. That one will run until the 2nd round (shall we say stage from now on?) starts. And so on … This way we'll always know one month in advance what game will come next.

the differents tournaments (go9 , and the other game)

are independents??

can i play only the 2nd tournament in july?

have you read the info?

Einstein will be the second stage. It's open for registration already. I'll start the 3rd stage poll later today. (Real live interference right now …)

@KPT: You can play as many or as few stages as you like. Very unlike the Tour de France. Also we don't have doping tests yet. ;-)

te parece q la he leido , gregorio??

@Richy : thankz

Rather than make a campaign speech in the voting thread, I suggest here Hex 19 as the next Tour game. It's nice and long, maybe as long as Go 19, for those who want a long-lasting game over the summer.

The Tour started out with a Go variant, so it's too soon to have another one. Spreading the Go variants out in the Tour “stages” seems like a good idea to me, playing Go as every 7th stage on average. The 19 non-Go games could be distributed as follows: Go19 could be followed by 8 non-Go stages, Go 13 by 6, and Go 9 followed by 5 non-Go stages.

The first group has completed the first round of Go 9x9. Congrats to Peter Koning!

From now on the standings can be seen on the website I linked to in the first message of this thread. I do check the tournament groups from time to time, but still I ask you to send me a private message or post here when a tournament group has finished, so I can update the results.

We now have 50 registered players for the second stage (Einstein). If I'm not mistaken that is exactly the minimum number that leads to a 3 round tournament.

There is a fair amount of luck in Einstein (as can be told by my recent success in the championship), so probably all of us have the chance to take over the lead after stage 2. Well, for many of us, myself included, that certainly is the last chance ever.

3 days left for registering for the 2nd stage (Einstein, currently 55 players) and for voting in the 3rd stage poll.

Dvonn is leading now.

57 players, wow!

The Einstein tournament has started with 58 players, Dvonn will be the next stage and is open for registration and the poll for the 4th stage has started.

Meanwhile we have a 2nd finalist for the 1st stage: Johubber

Last days for 3rd stage registration and 4th stage poll.

a tough battle between hex-19 and soccer at the poll !

The 3rd stage (DVONN) has started with 38 players. The poll for the 5th round has started too and I'll prepare the 4th round StreetSoccer tournament in a minute.

In the first stage we have 3 finalists so far: Ehtelenolwe, Peter Koning and Johubber.

I'll be on holiday for the next 2 weeks, I have no idea if I'll have internet access there and even if I have I might not want to use it. So don't expect any website updates (and moves in my games) during that period. Well, probably noone woud have noticed anyway. After all what's 2 weeks in the context of this tournament?

You can register for StreetSoccer (4th stage) here.

I think I am getting too many games. What do you think of starting new stages at a slower pace, maybe every second month?

40 is too many games? Try 240 …

I wouldn't… ;)

You don't have to register for the next round mungo—isn't that exactly the point? There will probably be people who want to play more games than you so they will be happy with the faster rate and you can just occasionally skip rounds.

I would prefer to go faster rather than slower as wel. And like some suggested you can choose not to play rounds.

Oh no! Not faster please. It is already fast enough with once per month.

Skipping rounds is not so nice, since of course the fun thing with the whole Tour is to be able to participate in all rounds. Therefore I think that there should be a pace which fits many. I think once per month is fine, slower would be ok as well, faster would not be ok.

Any change would not be ok.

“One stage per month” was the initial idea of Rickies initiative. Anyone can join more tournaments or even create own tournaments.

If s.o. needs to skip some stage but wants to have “comparable” (i.e. better) scores, he can do so and publish his own scoring method and result ;)

Go9x9 group 1.1 is finished

so you can update the scores

And the info at the registration page for StreetSoccer needs correction. It's 4th stage, not 2nd.

richy42, please update when you return from vacation.

To be clear I agree that no change of pace is the best. I only wanted to point out that if there would be a discussion about the pace I would support the faster rather than the slower.

I'm back (since sunday actually) and have finally managed to reach 'Games where it is your turn [0]' again. So I had time for updating tour stuff now. Thanks for pointing out the stupid copy and past error with the stage number. I have updated the results page which now reflects the standings after 5 of 6 frist round groups of stage 1 (Go9) have finished. The last group has only one game left, so the final will probably start soon. The first results from stage 2 will also come in soon. Meanwhile we are steering toward a new record in participation: so far 66 players have registered for StreetSoccer.

About the pace discussion: I'm sure we can find plenty of good reasons for a slower pace as well as for a quicker one. But even if one outscores the other I'll stick with the current pace for a very simple reason: this is what has been announced and what the players who have registered for the stages so far expect.

I agree fully.

another suggestion.

Since it is called 'Tour de Little Golem', it might be interesting to work be different standings and 'jerseys'

The yellow jersey would be the main jersey where you use the actual points as announced in the very beginning.

For the green jersey I would suggest to use the order in which players end, and then give best 30 or so points: the winner of the final group 30 then 29 and so on. Ties can be treated with the points the last would get (so reaching a next round would give a small extra bonus (opposed to the yellow where it gives a big extra bonus))

For instance: 3 second round groups: with results

Final group: 1,2,3

group 2.1: 1,2,3,4,5,6

group 2.2: 1,2,3,4,4,6

group 2.3: 1,2,3,3,5,6

points: 30,29,28

group 2.1: (see final),25,21,18,16,13

group 2.2: (see final),25,21,18,18,13

group 2.3: (see final),25,21,21,16,13

Or for the second group you could take all points and rank them, this gives an advantage to the groups with more players, (both points and son) but this is even less advantage than the disadvantage they have to qualify.

polka dots:

you might think of something similar but now the games are rathed:

example;

go, wyps, havannah, hex19: hors catégory

chess,… : 1st cat

go13, rev, …:2nd cat

.

.

.

Of course the discussion of which are in which would be very harsh, even painful if one takes it personal.

Last calls for registering for StreetSoccer (72 players so far) and for the 5th stage poll.

@Hjallti: In principle I like the idea of different jerseys. But I think the current point scheme is very close to your green jersey already. Too close to make it interesting, I think.

My recent go games all felt a lot like uphill battles, so declaring go as a max category climb sounds very reasonable to me! ;-)

What's the purpose of a yellow jersey ( I guess that's the “maillot jaune” ) without kisses by young ladies ( and tv broadcasts )?

Group 7 has finished the first round of stage 2 (Einstein). Winner: Marius Rombout van Riemsdijk. This is now included in the standings. In Go9 there is just one game open in round 1, so the final will start soon.

@richy I don't think the green and yellow would be that close. If I see it right the difference of a first and second spot would be much more in the official standing than 1 point.

I tried now some calculations to proof my point but it seems I might be mistaken.

At the standings page it would be nice to have columns about the Origin (which games were the points for) of the points. So something like:

name / total points / go 9 / Einstein / …

It would be a big matrix in the end… 100+ x 22 at least. might be better to have it clickable on the standings page rather than actually there.. I like the idea though

I was thinking along similar lines. I'll think about it some more and will probably come up with something eventually, but I don't promise when.

Although the 4th stage hasn't started yet (after all it should have) I have closed the poll for the 5th and opened the one for the 6th stage. The Breakthrough tournament is open for registration.

/putting aside organiser hat/

/putting on participant hat/

In the outstanding games we have 3 that come in 2 flavours. Hex, Reversi and Go. To avoid having a cluster of those at the end we should start playing a couple of those in the next stages. Since there were a few votes for Hex 19 in the last polls i choose that one to advirtise for. So lets vote for Hex 19!

After Go9 first round is done, we can have a Go tournament again.

Go tournaments (the “real” Go 19) take even longer than Hex 19. So it should start sooner.

So lets vote for Go 19!

We have a single leader at the moment: Looser

What a miserable failure to justify his/her nickname! ;-)

“Looser” must be as opposed to “tighter”, since “loser” would be the opposite of “winner”…

Oh yes, you are right of course! And there are a couple of games here where playing loose connections instead of tight ones is indeed good strategy. My English obviously isn't much better than my playing strength in most of the games on lg. ;-(

The link 'open for registration' on the webpage sends me to streetsoccer rather than breakthrough at the moment.

Copy and paste makes our lives so much easier … one should think. Thanks, I'll correct that as soon as I'm home.

klaashaas has secured 7 more points. He'll get to No-1 when all the games in his (EinStein) group finish.

Another thing about the info page. It would be good to have the golem-id next to each player's name. Some change their name quite often and this might help you with organizing the results faster (and without errors).

Oh, I do save the results with the player ID! I just don't show it (yet). I'm playing with an autogeneration tool for the website, but it may take some time until it's ready. (Not because it's so complicated, just because I don't know when I'll find the time to do it.) When it's ready it'll have a separate page for each player too.

Nice!

The result page now reflects the points won in the second Einstein group that finished recently. The page is now autogenerated (after I've copied the results manually into a textfile once. I'll probably be to lazy to automatize that as well) so I don't have to go through the hazzle of using open office base and calc any more. Player pages maybe next week.

Now there is a page for every player, so you can see where the points came from. I'll add pages for each stage when I find the time to do so.

Oh, and the results are corrected now. As Michael X pointed out to me some points were missing.

Great! Thanks

Another Einstein group has finished. Bernhard H is now in the lead.

How many players have registered for all the stages so far?

I have no idea. I only put players in my list as soon as they win their first point …

The 3rd Einstein group has finished in round 1. Klaashaas now has 14 points too.

Yet another Einstein group finished, results updated.

To answer my own question, 20 players have signed up for all four stages whose registration has closed.

4 stages: 20 players

3 stages: 10 players

2 stages: 21 players

1 stage: 57 players

Thanks, Marley, for your efforts.

As “3 stages” shows less than 4 stages” I assume those numbers mean “exactly n stages”

and in total 108 players have at least joined one Tour tournament.

(only 55 have completed their first round currently, as one can see from Richies Standings page)

Yes, Michael, the 209 registrations are from 108 players. “3 stages” is “exactly 3 stages”.

We should have a term for players who have registered for all stages. Something other than “monster”. Stage players? Complathletes? Versatiles?

Tourists? ;-)

With one Dvonn group finished we have a single leader again: Paavo Pirinen

The first soccer group has finished. New leader: duvelman

Last days for voting/registering for the next stages again!

Breakthrough starts tomorrow. 43 players ready to go.

StreetSoccer had 75.

EinStein had 58.

Go-9 had 38.

Dvonn had 38, too.

On which board size will Havannah be played?

Shouldn't there be at least two sizes, as there are also two for Reversi and Hex and three for Go?

A new month again. Breakthrough is running, Amazons open for registration and a new poll waits for votes.

I still think avoiding a cluster at the end would be nice, so I think we should go for go13, go19, hex13, hex19, reversi8, reversi10, connect6, gomoku, GWG or WYPS next. (I think connect6 and gomoku and equally wyps and GWG are similar enough to avoid having those in sequence too.)

@Thomas: To avoid such discussions I made a simple rule: 'Each game for which you can separately register in a championship counts as one game type, so we'll have 3 Go game types, but just one Dots and Boxes for example.'

Size 10 seems to be what the Havannah championship is using, so we'll use that too.

I hope Richard will not change the structure of the site radically. If he suddenly decided to have championships for all different variants my simple rule would break down and we'd have to reconsider.

I hope that WYPS will be played with numbers not with words. Both arithmic series as the ascending variant might be played as one is fast win version and the other full board.

Declaration of intent: To vote for Go19 not in this poll, but in the next one.

The championship started in September. If there were support to start the Tour segment on November 1, I wouldn't mind, but I can see if some think it's too close. But we need to start it soon, because it takes so long. I think it should be a priority to start longer games early and have the last few games be short, so we can approximate one full isolated cycle.

bump

I want to have this on the first page :-)

Being back from holiday I finally found the time to update the results. 4 groups have finished in the meantime. This didn't change the leader though, it's still duvelman.

Oh, and btw: If you want to register for round 6 (Amazons) or vote for round 7, now would be a good time.

To ensure a more or less uniform distribution of similar games over the stages I may start reducing the choices in the polls soon. Here are 3 rules I'll apply:

1. One of the 3 go variants shall be played in each third of the stages. (one in stage 1-7, one in stage 8-15, one in stage 16-22)

2. One of the 2 variants of reversi as well as hex shall be played in each half of the stages (1-11, 12-22)

3. Between 2 similar games at least 2 other stages have to be played. Different variants of one game count as similar (go9, go13 etc.), connect6 and gomoku are considered similar too, as well as WYPS and GwG.

Small question: you might use rule 2 as well to all similar games as explained in 3 or is this not longer possible due to what we already have done. Note that your rule implies that go can't be voted as the game of round 7.

If you apply similar to rule 2 the choices for the round 8 games are really reduced to: rev10, rev, hex19, hex, gomoku, connect6, Wyps and GwG. Since 4 of these games have to be in the first 11 stages, and there are only 4 stages left.

Then if in 12, 13 and 14 no go variant is chosen, the poll of 15 is between go19 and go13.

These rules were not meant to be applied to the current poll. I will apply them to determine which games I'll offer in future polls. I have considered handling similar games in the same way, as you suggest. The immediate restrictions for round 8 were one reason not to do that on such short notice. Although, if there is a general consensus I should do as you propose, I will. (Well, if there were such a consensus it should show in the voting results anyway, making all this redundant!)

Somehow I always supposed the games come in the same order for ever. So, after all games have been played once, it starts again with Go9, Einstein, Dvonn, Streetsoccer, Breakthrough,…. As soon as the second Go9 tournament has ended, all the Go9 points awarded at the first Go9 tournament are deleted and replaced by the new Go9 points. So that this is all kind of circular. It doesnt matter when you join in, 22 tournaments later, you will have played everything once.

Of course a new game added to the server might be added later to the circle of games.

Did I misunderstand?

I had the same impression.

Me, too, except new games would be interspersed.

I had that impression too. Oh, and I don't see the need for these new rules. If people really want that, the polls should show it. If people think it's fine that they start GO13 and GO19 as the two last games, then why not?

Agree, I thought so too. When all games have been played once, it should start over with Go9. If let's say Go19 be the first game it will probably not be possible to erase the old result. However, of course, if Einstein or Dvonn is chosen it might still be possible… How is it going to be?

I didn't. But when I read the information again your interpretation seems correct. The drawback, in my opinion, is that there will never be a Tour winner, only a Tour leader. And leadership will be very dependent on how many tournaments you have finished, so if you happen to have slow players in your latest tournaments it will be harder to take the lead.

I like the idea of having a declared Tour winner when the first full cycle is completed.

Yes, of course it'll start over again, at least that was my impression too! ;-)

I can see now though, that what I wrote about the order of stages can be read in a way that contradicts this. But all I wrote above about stage order was meant for the first 22 stages only. In other words: for the first cycle. From the second cycle on there is no more need for polls. Unless 2 or more new games are added simultaneously that is.

@Marius:

> If people really want that, the polls should show it.

I thought so too at first. But I now have the impression that quite a lot of players just vote for their favourite game, enter that one tournament and don't really care for the tour as a whole. And, to make that perfectly clear: there is nothing wrong with that. But I assume players who want to play (almost) all stages prefer not to have clusters of similar games and these are the people the tour is primarily meant for (although, to repeat myself, everyone is invited to play as few stage as one likes). My assumptions may be wrong of course. So if a couple of players who entered at least 4 of the 6 stages so far tell me so here in this thread or in a private message I will certainly drop those rules. Of course, if you actually see some sense in those rules you are allowed to voice that opimion too. :-)

About cycle winners: Surele we should declare such. Especially as there is no guarantee that he/she will ever be a tour leader. Theoretically stage 1 of cycle 2 may finish before the last stage of cycle 1 and that would mean stage 1 cycle 1 points wouldn't be valid any more at the moment the last points in cycle 1 are assigned.

When we come closer to this we can discuss what kind of stats we want to keep from earlier cycles. But there is no rush yet, I'd say.

We have enough things that have winners already - I like the idea of there only ever being a leader in the tour.

I have entered every stage so far, and I intend to enter every stage for at least the first cycle.

I support the new rules.

I very much want to see a leaderboard that encompasses all of the first cycle and nothing else.

The circular part is just the reason that these rules are necessary:

if it was once it wouldn't matter.

The pol system might inply that rev and rev10 are the last two (least popular) and than hex as penultimate and so on…

I would think that the voters would intelligent and vote some of these games earlier to avoid this stacking up, but that doesn't happen. So Richy is wise to impose it.

Say in three years we are in the cycle and we come into the months corresponding with the last chosen game. Suppose Go19 and Go13 than the 3 go games are next to eachother and before maybe the two reversi games.

The reason we need these rules here is the same is we need all the laws… it organises things better if people make choices only to benefit themselfs. Strange but not unexpected this happens on a site with only people who consider themselfs to be intelligent….

Another Soccer group had finished. The website should now be up to date again.

My opinion about clusters of similar games: Its nice to avoid them, but it is not really important. If there are clusters, that is no big deal. If Richy wants to avoid them (rsp. if people dont want them): Richy should start the remaining polls as he thinks it is best. Be aware: If you really want to avoid clusters you might have to restrict at some point the choices e.g. just to the two Reversi variants.

Last EinStein group of round 1 finished (more points for duvelman!).

Round 2 groups have started.

Yes, duvelman has a claer lead now. Website is updated.

The Go9 tournament has finished.

A couple of groups have finished, the go9 final being one of them. Congrats to Bernhard Herwig, klaashaas and Johubber. klaashas and duvelman are now sharing the lead with 26 points.

In the second round of EinStein those leaders had a direct battle with duvelman as winner!

I hope he has his where-abouts filled in right because the Flemish Anti-Doping Tribunal is on his toes already… :-)

Several more groups have finished. There was quite a bit of movement in the rankings. Our now unique leader is Klaashaas 5 points ahead of Bernhard H.

And btw: just a couple of days left for registering for dots and boxes or voting for stage 8.

Will you add the Toroidal Go version in the Tour?

As soon as there is a specific Torodial Go championship. Which might happen soon or never. Who knows. :-)

I've updated the website again. 3 more groups had finished. Now Bernhard Herwig is in the lead followed by klaashaas with just 1 point difference.

The little monsters are rising :)

For the February 1 section (the one now being polled) I'd most enjoy chess. But even more, I think we need to start some of the doubles: Reversi-8/-10; Go Moku/Connect 6; Hex-13/-19. Any others I'm forgetting?

Anyway, I'll vote for whichever part of some double gets traction in the poll.

I'll do the same

If Wyps is played with words (which I in fact wouldn't want) than GWG WYPS is the fourth double.

I also will postpone my vote to support a double

I think you'll find that Wyps and GWG are less similar than one might think, Hjallti. Also, since the Wyps championship is played with words, the Tour version will be so too - at least that's what I assume.

I know they are not that similar but WYPS with numbers is much fair in my opinion. Did you see some of the black to play and win puzzles Richard himself posted in the Word Game forum?

The double to vote on is Hex ;)

hex 13 or hex 19?

why hex and not rev?

Because hex already got votes. Seemingly its going to be Hex 13. Which is a pity, as Hex 19 lasts much longer. But that cannot be helped.

Duvelman wins his second round einstein group for 8 more points (only awarded later) and prospects for more third round points.

Hex-13 is only better than 19 now, just after the Go-19 :)

I'll vote for hex-13 if it's between that and a non-double. But I'm not crazy about it, since the championship is about to start and I'd rather be playing different games.

Now we have a battle between hex-13 and hex-19 :)

@Dvd If the champ is about to start, than it is one and half month before feb 1th and so it is not simulateous?

why are there so many people in round two of the dvonn tournament? I thought only the winners go through to the next round, but it appears that all the 2nd place people made it through too.

Outch. That's indeed unexpected. Is that some glitch or a change in how user tournaments work I wonder.

What do we do?

Should we (who don't deserve this round) resign all our games?

That might screw your ratings. Has anyone heard from Richard about this issue?

well, not if we resign in the first move :)

Don't resign… let Richy42 start a new UT with the proper second round player (locked) and make it clear to everyone that this is where the points go. And enjoy the extra UT for the honour.

And let Richard M know there was a surprise…

A new UT may divide the players in groups. I think the rules are different for grouping between 1st and 2nd round.

richy42 can always decide to keep all the players (so we may get a few bonus points :)

here are two suggestions:

1) play the tournament, then at the end, award points only to the first round tournament winners based on how they placed relative to other first round winners (including the results against 2nd place finishers).

2) play the tournament, then at the end discard all results by the 2nd place players. Richy42 will have to manually construct a round-robin table from the results and calculate the tiebreaks, but this is probably the fairest way to do it.

It is tempting to just play the tournament as is, but it is an unfair advantage not only to the 2nd place winners, but also the 1st place winners because there will be so many points awarded in the 2nd round. The DVONN winner will get 26 points from the 2nd round - that's ridiculous!

I think I'm a 2nd place guy. I've not played any moves and am prepared to just resign them all if that would make things easier. Of course, I'd prefer to actually play the games…

Well, there was a group in round 1 with a triple tie for place 1 (IMO, I did benefit most, because of a very lucky win against one of the real champions) So there are even 3 (legal ;) participants from group 3.

I think it's not too unfair that we have to compete some more participants.

But round 2 participants really get lots of points, I agree with hammurabi. Richy might rethink his score system. Or do we misunderstand his comment on points for a tie ? (Aren't place 1 and 2 of round 1 treated as a tie here?)

I'd propose let's play all games and help Richy with opinions how to score them, independently. (I understand Richy is doing the calculations manually anyway ?)

I think I prefer hammurabi's suggestion 2.

And yes, I have asked Richard about this and suggested that the maximal groupsize and number of players advancing become parameters when setting up a user tournament. The answer I recieved was 'I will change it soon.' I don't know how soon soon is, but I hope soon enough for the next 2nd round tournament starting. Neither am I sure what it will change to, but I hope either to what it was before or to my suggestion (with the old numbers as a default).

I see having a stable user tournament environment as a requirement for the tour. The tour wouldn't make much sense (at least I wouldn't want to organise it) if we had to re-decide about how points are handed out every 6 months.

Yes, hammurabi's sugestion 2) is the right way to go.

EinStein, round 2, group 3:

klaashaas, Marius Rombout van Riemsdijk and muggel_b tied in places 2-4.

They should have 2x(1+2+3)/3 = 4 points each, not 6, 4 and 2.

Thanks for spotting that, ypercube. Will be corrected in the next update. (Hopefully in half an hour.)

Website updated. Bernhard has a 10 points lead now.

At the moment I am not sure if/how the tour can/will be continued. The way points are awarded rely on stable group sizes. Until recently we had max. 7 players per group. This suddendly changed without warning about a week ago. Richard told me privately that something will change soon. As long as I neither know exactly how user tournaments work today nor have any idea how they will work tomorrow it doesn't make much sense to start new tournaments. Handling the unexpected 2nd round groupsizes of tournaments already running will be enough of a burden.

Consequently I will not let the go19 tournament start on January 1st unless the situation has cleared up by then. Sorry for this. Organising the Tour costs me a significant amount of time, but it is fun too. I hope we can continue. If you know a solution without massive administrative overhead let me know.

I don't agree with that. The go19 tournament may reach round 2 after months! We saw only changes in round 2, not round 1.

Well, look at this (http://www.littlegolem.net/jsp/tournament/tournament.jsp?trnid=ut.gmk.99.1.1) recently started user tournament and tell me that there are no more than 7 people in the group. :-)

Yes, you are right. This changes things.

I think it should be possible for an organizer of a user tournament to decide the maximum number of players in each group… that would solve the problems, right?

Even if we dont start Go 19 so soon, we will close the pole for the next round game at 31st of december. Am I right?

Yes, we'll close the poll together with the year.

Anyone interested in voting for the Feb-2010 stage, should be aware of the discussion during the first december days in this thread here, starting with

Dvd Avins … “I think we need to start some of the doubles” …

(Hoping this is not the last post of this year)

I will vote on Wednesday (EST)

Once again the announcement: the go tournament will NOT start on january first. But the running poll will still be closed.

Reason: I don't know / can't define how the group sizes will be.

I have set the start day to february 1st now, but it may actaully start sooner or later, depending on when we have a solution.

Sorry for this, but I don't have a clue what else to do.

I think the question was rather weather we start a new voting in Jan, independently if a new tournament will start or not…

I think we should only start voting when the Go tournament starts and the Hex 19 tournament is open for registration

Yes, that's how I planned it, sorry for not answering before. The newest einstein user tournament started with 7 players per group. I've asked richard if we can expect this to be a stable behaviour. So there is some hope we can move on.

Since I was on holidays, I missed this discussion and only very briefly browsed through these last posts.

I just noticed that round 3 of the einstein tournament has just started and that the group is rather big: http://www.littlegolem.net/jsp/tournament/tournament.jsp?trnid=ut.einstein.51.3.1

I'm just guessing that we're with 9 because their was a 3-way tie in group 2 and therefore all third place finishers advance. Is this normal behavior? Never gave any attention to this really, but it seems strange to me. Anyway, I've not made a move yet and will not until I hear if this is the expected behavior or richy tells me what to do…

All second place finishers advanced. But on group 3, there were 3 players tied at places 2 to 4 and they all advanced.

Kitaktus (3rd place in group 1) did not advance.

ITYM there were 3 players tied at equal 2nd place who advanced. None of them were at 3rd or 4th place.

ok, ic. I did not took a detailed look so that explains it. Hence thank you for the explanation!

I got a reply to my message to Richard. Not neccessarily an answer though. He confirmed that now the first two players of each group are promoted to round 2. I still have no reliable information about group sizes and if we can expect the current state to be stable. On Wednesday I was in a fairly foul mood and was ready to give up the tour completely. Today my mood is slightly better. My new approach: Let's try to live with what we can't change. For the tour this means: We will continue completely ignoring all the problems arising from the changes in the behaviour in the past and future. The scheme for distributing points just stays the same, no matter how many players proceed or how large the groups are. If you want to tell me how grossly unfair that is to some players go ahead. But rest assured I'm well aware of that already. I just have better things to do in my life than constantly reinventing the tour. If the user tournaments stay stable from now on, so will the tour. If they don't, I can't help it.

I will let the go tournament start tomorrow. I hope I'll find the time tomorrow to start a new poll and update the website.

Sorry if this message sounds a bit grumpy. I still think this is a great site and I'm still grateful to Richard for giving it to us. But it's sometimes hard not to be frustrated about how much better it could even be if Richard were just communicating a bit more.

OK, thanks! I think this is a good way to go… Anyway nothing is perfect in this world, but as long as spirit is high it is fine anyway. Good work richyfourtytwo! Let's keep up and continue the tour. ;)

Great! Let the Go games have a Go :)

Yes, I am also enjoying the Tour and I don't mind it not being completely fair. Keep up the good work richyfourtytwo!

richy, will you make the Hex-19 tourney too and start a new poll?

Done!

Website is also updated.

bump

Hex has started, Gomoku is open for registration and a new (somewhat restricted) poll (of questionable relevance) has started too.

Meanwhile I'm getting a bit busier in real life. No reason to be alarmed though, the tour will go on. I surely will still find the time to run polls, start tournaments and update the website now and than. But I won't invest any time in pushing the tour de little golem anti cheating campaign any further, nor will I organise special tournaments for second rounds where cheaters have advanced / will advance. (I know I made different statements about this before, sorry for that.) Of course I'm still willing to blacklist cheaters so they can't participate in new stages. The rules for that and an anti cheating board is in place.

amazons tournament started with 2nd placed players in second round….

Standings updated.

Should I play those amazon games, or not?

Play, of course, if you like to.

Just leave it to Richy how to assign Tour points afterwards.

Most have started, some are even finished (in move 0/1, as a cheaters boycott)

Last breakthrough group finished.

Round 2 started with 17 players in 3 groups (5, 6 and 6 players).

Hjallti, you may have missed or misinterpreted my message in this thread from 2010-01-08. It basically says that we'll live with this change of the site (and any others still waiting for us) without changing the tour rules. So everyone, just keep playing, even if you find yourself in the 2nd round after finishing 6th in the first.

In other words, play the games and try to win them all :)

Well, I still won't play against cheaters. Let them get bored without me.

Actually, I still didn't have the time to go through discussions, and just wanted to get a direct order. Sorry for that. :-)

Richy, your “standings” page might be updated (thanks ;-),

could you update your main page - with a link to registration for the next stage (gomoku), please ?

Hope this link works as well

I'll probably get around to updating the website tomorrow.

Website updated, including main page. The leaders now:

1. Bernhard Herwig 57

2. klaashaas 52

3. Ricardo (Santos) 46

I'm getting more and more busy in RL. Any chance someone (with membership) could take over responsibility for watching this thread closely, organising the polls and setting up the tournaments? I would still maintain the website. I'd be extremely grateful if someone could step in.

I just set up the poll; but this is no intention declaration, my real life has also been hectic since Xmas

Reversi 10 is now open for registration and will start April 1, 2010

by the way, this is also no intention declaration from my side ;)

OK, just have to try something I just learned from ypercube…

so to register please click

here

Again this proves to be an amazing community, thanks guys!

Don't forget to sync your blacklist with richy before the tournament starts, Ricardo.

Just to confirm… this is open to new players, correct? This would be my first Tour tournament.

Yes, you are welcome to join any time!

The website should be up to date again.

Website updated. The streetsoccer stage had finished.

BTW: rororo is now watching tour tournaments for me and sends me a message whenever a group finishes. Many thanks to this nice little robot and his mentor FatPhil!

Havannah tournament is open for registration, new poll is running. Website update has to wait until tonight, possibly even until some quite moment on the easter weekend.

Website updated. Recognised cheaters deleted, Second round dots results added. No changes in the first 8 standings positions.

havannah monthly's are at size 8 are the championships size 10? Strange… if been practizing wrong.

Stage 13 chess tournament is open for registration. The poll for stage 14 is running. Website should be up to date.

Havannah is size 10 without swap.

Which is hopefully the same as the championship. At least that was the intention.

Note that according to the current rule of thumb, go19 with Hahn counting might be considered as well in the tour!

EinStein final group (3rd level) has just finished.

So have a couple of gomoku groups. I'm fairly busy today. I'll update the website on Saturday, possibly tommorrow.

Website updated. This time it's really worth having a look. Her's the link again so you don't have to scroll all the way up: Info about the Tour de Little Golem

Many 1st round gomoku groups have finished. So have the final rounds of Einstein and Amazons. Congratulations to the winners Ricardo (Santos), muggel_b, and MichaeI X. Don't be irritaded by the recognised cheater who's name appears above michaels in the tournament table.

Bernhard Herwig managed to keep position 1, but it's getting closer. Now we have 13 players with more than 50 points!

Go with Hahn counting has it's own championship. To be honest that looks fairly arbitrary to me.

I always wanted to avoid that discussion, but maybe I can't any longer: Which games (variants) should be part of the tour? Should variants been taken into account? All? Just some? How to decide? I'd like to hear your opinions.

Dvonn round 2 about to finish.

Dvonn has finished, won by Paavo Pirinen. Congratulations!

2 other goups have fnished too, all this is now reflected on the website. And we have an new leader: Ricardo (Santos)

Only a few days to register for chess btw.

With all those new WYPS championships it's now obvious that my old rule (if it has a championship it's in the tour) doesn't make sense anymore.

Instead of that rule we'll use the original game list for now:

o Go 19

o Go 13

o Go 9

o Chess

o Reversi on board 8x8

o Reversi on board 10x10

o Gomoku

o Dots and Boxes

o DVONN

o Four in row

o Twixt PP

o Hex on board 13x13

o Hex on board 19x19

o Amazons

o Breakthrough

o Lines of Action

o Connect6

o Havannah

o Golem's word game

o StreetSoccer

o Game of Empathy

o EinStein wuerfelt nicht!

From now on you can officially campaign in this thread to add new stages or to get rid of old ones. If a suggestion gets some support here I'll set up a poll. If the suggestion gets at least a two third majority it's accepted. In these polls everyone can vote, but the votes of those participants of the tour, who have won points in at least three different stages already, count twice.

WYPS ascending has been asked for frequently already, so I'll set up a vote for that.

Lines of Action Black Hole

did you miss the standard (letter, english) WYPS intentionally? Then I'll start lobbying for it.

I took the list as it was when the tour started. At that point WYPS wasn't there. In this sense I missed in intentionally.

4 post above the line

Game of Empathy

should be ignored.

Tour maintenance done. Everything should be up to date again. Our new leader is an old one: Bernhard Herwig

I think Game of Empathy should be one of the Tour games.

1. GoE can be voted for just like any other game.

2. When GoE wins the election, the following month is GoE “registration” (to be defined).

3. The 9 or 10 games of Empathy that begin and end in the month following the registration month are round 1.

4. If more than some number (TBD) of players register, then the following month's Empathy games are round 2 for some number (TBD) of top players of round 1.

Granted, GoE is different from other games in that you have to “make your move” during a 3-day window to score, which is more demanding than the 10-days-plus-36-hours-per-move used in other games. And it would be harder on players who take their vacation during the round 1 month. How about GoE round 1 in October? No major holidays, and nobody takes vacation in October, do they?

But I submit that GoE is an essential part of Little Golem, and its inclusion in the rather light-hearted Tour is appropriate, even though it is excluded from the hardbitten dog-eat-dog Monster.

seems good.

but 9 or 10 ten games for round is too much.

maybe 4 games 1round

and then 3 games more for the 2round and final.

In my opinion, GoE has no place in the tour - just as it had no place in the Monstership.

I agree: In my opinion, GoE has no place in the tour.

As long as there's no GoE championship, it contradicts one of the first rules of the Tour definition.

By design, GoE is different in so many aspects, let's keep it that way.

( counting the best 5 entries of a month could be a nice compromise between Marley's and kpato's proposals. But how would you count a 10-tie for place 1 of a repeat ? )

Agree with Marius as well.

Breaktrhough 3rd (and final) round has started with 7 players, mainly from Europe:

Norway 1

Germany 2

France 1

Switzerland 1

Greece 1

and

1 from Congo.

(… ORDER BY country.latitude DESC)

Norway

…

Greece

Congo

could also have been ORDER BY financial.situation, but the 3 others probably don't fit.

;-)

@Michael X: I would propose a player's score is the sum of the player's 9 (or 5) highest scores during the month's games. Whether any of those scores tied other players would not be relevant.

To normalize the effect of the number of players per game on the scores, the sum could be of the player's score as a percentage that game's high score.

Taking the sum of the player's 4 or 5 best GoE games of the month seems like a good idea to me.

I will admit the GoE has language and cultural barriers, but so do GWG and WYPS-English. I will also admit that compiling the scores would be more work for someone than is needed for a tournament in other LG games.

I finally found the time to update the website again. Only 2 tournament groups finished though.

Now my webspace provider has connection trouble, so I can't upload the new results. :-(

So the core of this message is: none.

OK, I can say so much: no changes in the first 5 places.

Ha, upload worked now, website up to date!

New poll started, Twixt stage open for registration, website updated (although I dind't check for groups that have finished), new identified cheater blacklisted and thrown out of result list.

I'll be fairly busy and/or on holiday till August 2nd. Don't expect any more website updates until that day. Well, so far you have proven to be very patient, so I don't expect a major uproar.

I wish everyone (on the northern hemisphere) I nice summer!

off-topic but mentionwhorthy: the event that inspired our's competion name is being held on France since yesterday. Fabian Cancellara won the prologue and Alessandro Petacchi won the 1st stage. Cancellara is the yellow jersey wearer. Lance Armstrong is in the fourth position, 22” behind him.

bump

I'm back and I'll do the maintenance stuff later today, maybe tomorrow.

OK, everything should be uo to date again. Lot's of groups have finished, surprisingly this didn't change anything in the first 3 positions.

Due to some malware trouble I had to do some manual typing instead of using copy and paste, so the error probability is a bit higher than usual. If something looks wrong when you check your (or other) results, please yell!

For a question of isonomy (those who already voted wouldn't have those choices), I suppose we shouldn't include shogi and oski in the 17th poll; nevertheless, we should welcome these two new games into the tour and, in due time, include them in the 18th poll!

Alternative: include them right now in the 17th poll and give those who already voted a permision to change their votes only if they now vote one of the two new games (but I still prefer the 1st solution).

King of Thebes I asked:

> The championship for LOA is blackhole. Would the Tour tournament be black hole as well?

I wasn't aware of that problem. Answer: No. I've skipped that 'championship rule' some time ago. The stages stay what we've expected them to be in the beginning, unless we decide (by polling) to take up new or drop stages.

Same answer for shogi ans oski.

In 'Same answer for shogi ans oski' you mean that they shouln't be included in the Tour?

I mean that for now they ARE not included.

See my message from 2010-05-26 in this thread for more info.

Personally I think oski shouldn't be included, I don'thave a strong opinion about shogi. But these preferences of mine will only have influence in the process in as much as I have a vote like anyone else if we have a poll.

That considered, I officialy campaing for the inclusion of both oski and shogi into the Tour; I also campaing for the exclusion of both go13 and go9 - I don't see the point of making Go so valuable as to include 'learning boards' in the Tour; as for reversi and hex, I have no official position on the matter of two different board sizes for these games in the Tour. I seem to recall having read somewhere in LG's fora that rev8 and rev10 having some subtil strategic differences (eg, importance of the corner) - as for hex, I'm clueless.

Shogi would be fine to include in the tour. But Oski will always have a language bias, so it's OK with me to omit it.

I admit the 'language bias problem'. But, on the other hand, we do have (as for now) GWG in the tour - and here the bias also exists. If two biased games is one two many, I would prefer oski over golem's

I think new games should be included in the tour after some time, so we all can practice these games. So a natural time to include the games, is the time when championship starts! (Which is similar to the “Monster rules” - although I know that the tour and the moster are two different tournaments with separate rules).

I've been on holiday fairly long. When I came back I had work on getting my game number down a bit. Additionally I was fairly busy in RL and my netbook was taken over by malware so I had to reinstall everything. For all these reasons I didn't update the standings for a very long time. Well, I did so now.

I was used to seeing Bernhard Herwig on the very top of the list. That has changed now. Congrats to hammurabi for taking over the lead!

I'm still fairly busy, so the standings are outdated. I hope I'll be able to update them next weekend on the train.

That would be great thanks :)

Standings updates, thanks to mobile internet connectivity. :-)

I'm in Berlin the next 3 days. If someone living there wants a quick face to face game in some cafe, let me know!

I never played “Wyps Ascending”. It is a little late now, bit I started a user tournament for everybody who wants to try it before the little golem tour starts. Well its not really a lot before that, but still, if a few players play fast, one might get a little bit of the feel for the game.

It starts in 5 days. So hurry with your registration :-)

You can find it here try out, as I had some trouble to remember where you can find UTs…

Bernhard's WYPS ascending tournament is at http://www.littlegolem.net/Ctrn.action?view=&dto.id=244.

Carroll, your URL has an IP address, which means the site doesn't recognize those of us logged in to the domain www.littlegolem.net (because browsers don't send “www.littlegolem.net”'s cookies to “81.2.209.236”).

Yes you are right, I'll check for this in the future for @s where the site needs your cookie!

What are the rules and does this, and does “wyps ascending” have a separate rating to the english language variant?

I think it has a different rating.

You have to make a chain of ascending (increasing) numbers. The tiles go from 1 to 8, so 2-3-6-8 would be legal, if at least one of the tiles is new on the board.

It is a full board game, so the winning condition is to have a Y at the end (a 3boarder connection during the game has not much importance and does not have to be broken in the next move).

On the other hand a tile can only be turned once, so turning a tile makes it fixed to your color, and you only turn at most one opponent stone during your move.

Thankyou

Only 5 games left and a full Tour de Little Golem is completed…what happens after that? Is the sequence of the games fixed and no more voting? Once Go9 is played again, I guess the result of the old Go9 is erased, or? Will it then be erased when the new Go9 starts or ends?

I don't think it should be repeated, I think there should be some elasticity. Maybe, assuming there are 20 game types, then no game can be played less than 18, or more than 22 from its previous run. That way we'll always have a choice of 5.

That requires a little more admin overhead, but it's only once a month and probably simpler than most of the other overhead.

I don't see much gain in such elasticity (while I do see the overhead). It would even provoce a voting-strategy meta-game. (I did well in Einstein last time, so let's postpone that as far as possible.) One may like that, but I don't.

As Ricardo said: fixed order (modulo adding new stages or throwing old ones out), old results erased as soon as a stage has completed all rounds in the new cycle.

I just don't like the idea that it's all set in stone now. The choice and voting was a fun part of the procedure, and it would be a shame to see that go all the way from being an integral part to being a non-existent part.

hex 13 is open for registration, a new poll is running. I've also updated the standigs.

Out leader, hammurabi has also won the breakthrough stage (congrats!) which equipped him with a comfortable lead.

Once again standings updated. No changes in the order of the first 3 positions, although ypercube has moved closer to Bernhard.

maraca has won the twixt stage, congratulations. With the points won there he passed quite a few other players, yours truly amongst them.

Thanks. Does the next cycle start immediately after this one is finished? In this case go 9x9 might be replaced before some games have finished in the first cycle.

Yes, I would like to see a final standing for the first cycle, including all games, all rounds, all points of the first cycle.

Yes and yes. I don't see that as a problem. Possibly go 19 of cycle 1 will still be running when cycle 3 has started! :-)

So you intend to keep several separate standings, one current standing, one standing cycle 1, one standing cycle 2?

I haven't really thought about it. Surely a current standing. And maybe just cycle results when a cycle is completed completely.

Sounds good!

Website updated(*), 4 in a row open for registration. We've got the order sorted out now, so there is no new poll. I still hope FatPhil will keep us updated about his desires to play strip poker or not.

(*) Filezilla boycotts the upload of the new index file since half an hour, I hope I'll convince it later. All other stuff should be OK.

It seems OK now.

Thanks for letting me know, ypercube. Seems the transfer worked all the time, but FileZilla didn't notice and bombarded me with error messages.

Sii Porfin!!!!

ToL 4ir!

Lines of action is open for registration at

Lines of action

If you hadn't noticed

Apparently Richy didn't notice himself.

Oh, I did! I even signed up! :-)

Sorry for being a bit slow atm, I'm fairly busy in real life. I hope I will manage to update the results in the next couple of days though.

thnx. Correct the date for the Four in a row tourney to 2011-02-01 when you do. (now it says 2011-01-01)

btw, why is it lines of action 8x8? I would prefer to play 9x9 black hole. I don't like to play games where there exist bots better than humans (at least not turn based).

I kept trying to vote for black hole 9x9, the tour is supposed to have every game that has a championship? On the plus side Jamaica stopped playing ;)

That with Jamaica is right :) I don't think we play every game, the tour changed to a democratic tour de golem with richy having the last word ;)

King of Thebes, it was supposed to have each championship game… but this would give WYPS variants in languages with the current cv and go-hahn pointing for instance. It would have been not good for the tour.

Games with language bias it is understandable. 8x8 LOA no longer has a championship!

Quick comment (because short on time, on a business trip): the list of games is that that have been present when the tour has started, modified by changes run through votes.

When the tour started LOA black hole didn't exist. Feel fre to advertise for changes. If you get some level of positive responses i'll set up a poll.

Sorry for the out of date results. I'm very short of time atm (but fortunately still manage to make moves in my games).

Finally I got around to updating the results. I'll still have a fairy tight schedule the next 2 months, so don't expect the next update soon.

Oh, and I've started registration for shogi a couple of days early. :-)

Oh boy! You mean I'll have to wait 2 months before I see myself in first place?

Oh boy!

Even worse yper, you may be virtually in 1st place while I'm travelling and when I get back you could have dropped a few positions again thus being robbed of the glory completely!

Even worse…

And the reversi final has ended! It was one move away from completion during my previous post :(

Congratulations to klaashaas, the winner of reversi 10 and ypercube, our new overall leader!

And I now know someone who owes me a beer when I'm in Athens next time. (Low risk: I have never been to Greece and I actually don't drink beer.)

Wine perhaps? Greek wine is better that greek beer anyway.

Congrats yper :)

When I get first I'll give you a belgian beer…. the risk is lower: the chance you ever get to Greece is much bigger than I ever getting in front :^)

I've created the go 9x9 tournament for stage 1 cycle 2. Too busy to update the website atm, sorry for that.

By the way… Einstein is open for registration :)

Hi all,

finallY I've prepared everything to upload new standings, but now the ftp upload fails completely. :-(

I have signed up for an ad-free free hoster (heliohost) now to move the lg tour pages there. It may take up to 48 hours though until I have access, and it may well be the next weekend when I find the time to move the data there.

:-(

I just found out heliohost isn't the solution. They delete the account after 1 month of inactivity. Far too quick for me.

Has anyone a suggestion for a stable free hoster with no (or unobstrusive) ads?

how much space would you need? I own a domain I'm not using at all, and we could use that one. You could have up to 150 MB. Also, my package allows me to grab another free domain name (although only with .de), so you could even pick a domain name (and I order it and let you use it)

You would need to behave nicely though, as we would share one ftp access.

of course, you could just buy your own domain package. It's 1 Euro and change a month for 3 domains and 200 MB. Advertisement and hassle free, of course.

Thanks, Aganju for the offer. But even though I can behave if I tra hard somehow I don't like to share your provate account.

Anyway, this morning the upload worked fine, so the problem is at least solved for the time being.

The standings should be more or less up to date now.

DVONN is now open for registration….

http://www.littlegolem.net/Ctrn.action?view=&dto.id=389

4th Stage (2nd Cycle) of the Tour is now open for registration. Thus, it is time for Street Soccer :)

http://www.littlegolem.net/Ctrn.action?view=&dto.id=400

Thanks Ricardo!

BTW: I hope I'll manage to update the standings before my holiday starting on the 13th. But I'm terribly busy atm, so I can't promise.

Last time we were 75 participants, let's see if we can break that number… Currently we are 14 ;)

OK, so now we are 44 participants, but still a couple of days left to sign up! ;) Don't miss this chance… :) Will we make it to 75 again?

Would you get more participants if you put the signup URL into Info about the Tour de Little Golem?

Hi all,

as many of you doubtlessly have noticed I'm far behind with updating the tour web pages again. Being extremely busy at work and also with other interests creeping up I rarely find the time to handle tour stuff. So after a bit more than 2 years I would like to retire from my job as 'tour chairman'. I'm sure in a vivid community as this one we'll find one or more persons to take over.

Now, that no regular voting has to be done any more the job has the following parts:

- having a look at this thread regularly

- making polls about adding/deleting games when required

- maintenance of result web pages

The 3rd part is the worst. I manually watch for finished tournaments[*], add the results in an easy comma separated format to a text file and let a small java program generate the html files. I'm not sure I have prepared that program for the 2nd cycle yet. Of course I would hand over that program (netbeans project) to whoever takes over. It would clearly be possible to automate the process completely.[**]

So, who is volunteering? What about YOU?

For now, Ricardo, could you set up the next (5th stage) tournament (breakthough)? Thanks!

Cheers

richyfourtytwo

[*] Thanks to FatPhil rororo has some support for this though, I just stopped using it when he was down for a while and re-synchronising was too much of a burden.

[**] The largest problem would probably be that the points in one group are dependent on the max. group size across all groups, so there is some non-localness involved. Solvable, but annoying.

5th Stage (2nd Cycle) of the tour is now open for registration :)

http://www.littlegolem.net/Ctrn.action?view=&dto.id=414

That is breakthrough…

Breakthrough started, what's next to register? ( Amazons ? )

Richy, what about updating your page.

(It will become harder every month, if this hint is helpful for you ;)

I have volunteered to take over updating the standings page, due to Richy42's time constraints. Unfortunately I have some time constraints, too, so it's going to be soon, but not real soon.

Thanks a lot for that MarleysGhost!

Ricardo, could you set up the Amazons tournament?

I'll try to update the overview page over the weekend.

6th Stage (2nd Cycle) of the tour is now open for registration ;)

The time has come to Amazon!!! Please register

here

Sorry, being late… I'm also experiencing time constraints…

Enjoy the Amazon route!

That's really great MarleysGhost that you will help out with the updating!!! I wonder where we are now, who is the leader…?

You should use the player's id, not name.

Two persons can have the same name.

Names can change.

Some have non-ASCII characters (as Henrik's) which can be trouble if not treated properly.

Good points. The code uses the id. I posted only the names in a perhaps mistaken belief that that would be a more user-friendly post. And I put a lot into the code to deal with non-ASCII, although you would never know it from the way I mangled Henrik's name in the above post.

I haven't checked the list in detail, but it looks reasonable.

Please update the Standings page soon. I'm starting to feel dizzy …

I have the data and should find the time to upload later today!

That's great!!! I also start to feel dizzy ;)

Sorry folks, a bit more patience you will still need. There is a slight inconsistency in the rule interpretation between MarleysGhost and me that needs to be puzzled out first. I should have checked BEFORE making that announcement this morning, sorry for that.

Stay tuned …

OK, many thanks to MarleysGhost for providing the results. I think he has automated it completely now (I only had a semi-automated method).

There is still something to be clarified about the cycles. From my point of view currently only cycle 1 points count, as no stage of cycle 2 have finished yet. I'll discuss that with MarleysGhost.

Enjoy all the new points you just recieved!

Now that everything is automated, I'm going to ask for more statistics :-)

What about renormalizing the score for each round by the total number of points awarded in that round?

i.e. for example, if (say) Go9x9 #1 awarded a total of 100 points, divide all corresponding scores by 100. This should help normalizing out differences in attendance between the different games.

Yes, the gathering and formatting of data is fully automated, suitable for a cron job. E-mailing the standingsYYYYMMDD.zip file to richyfourtytwo is manual.

Well, there are at least three ways to incorporate the results of stages into the standings:

X. Count tour points from the finished stages only.

Y. Count tour points from the finished stages and from finished rounds of running stages.

Z. Count tour points from finished stages and from all finished groups of running stages.

I implemented Y without thinking much about it. With X, you expect the standings to change on average once a month. Y changes 2 or 3 times a month (i.e. the number of rounds in a stage times the number of stages per month). Z changes as often as a group finishes, which must average at least 8 and maybe 12 or 15 times a month. I figured X was good for a mostly manual system, Z would mean updating the standings HTML too often, and Y was a good compromise.

However,

while X, Y and Z are all functional as far as reporting the ongoing results of any one particular cycle, Y and Z are clumsier for what we might call the “rolling” results, namely, the most recently finished stage for each of the 23 games, without regard to cycle boundaries. (Is “rolling” the official name? “latest”? “current”? what?) For Y, you might make a case for removing round 1 of cycle n-1 from the results when round 1 of the same game in cycle n finishes, but I don't think I want to implement that. And Z would be bad, bad, bad for the rolling results.

Soooo, what I'm thinking now is that the next iteration of the standings code will have columns for grand total, for cycle 1 and for cycle 2, showing X and maybe Y in parentheses. The first standings after the first finished stage of cycle 2 will also have a “rolling” column containing X only.

Who's in first?

Then there's the question of sorting. The standings posted 2011-09-13 sorts by grand total Y. I would think there should also be pages sorted by cycle 1 Y, cycle 2 Y, and rolling X.

Normalization.

Mongoose had normalization in his GoE statistics pages. Before implementing something without thinking about it, what do the assembled LG tourers think?

From my point of of view 'rolling X' is the 'official standing'. All the others I consider as nice to haves. Very nice to haves actually!

The overview/schedule page has been updated after a long, long time again. Thanks a lot to MarleysGhost!

7th Stage (2nd Cycle) of the Tour de Little Golem is now open for registration… :) The time has come to play “Dots and Boxes”.

Since I don't have time tomorrow, I open it already today.

Don't miss this opportunity, take the chance to registrate immediately…

Cheers, Ricardo

Thanks, Ricardo!

New results that have been complied by MarleysGhost uploaded!

Yet another update from that ghost of Bob!

[Note: I didn't know who Bob Marley was when I chose this name. I'm the ghost of Jacob.]

And I didn't know about Jacob! But the Christmas Carol was on my 'to be read' list anyway! :-)

8th Stage (2nd Cycle) of the Tour de Little Golem is now open for registration! :) Please register for the Go19 tournament. Here is a LINK

Thanks Marley for the reminder…

I'm about to add a column with a normalized result to the standings page, where “about to” means “hopefully before 2011-12-01”). On 2010-06-10, I suggested dividing (official) points by the highest number of points won by any player of the stage. On 2011-09-14, antony suggested dividing by the total number of points awarded in the stage. The former awards 1.0 to all those who tie for first in the final round. The latter awards 1.0 total to all participants.

Any thoughts about which better achieves the goal of correcting for the number of entrants in the various stages? Or some third normalization scheme?

Sounds great, Marley! It seems The Tour is loosing participants, compared to the first cycle… I don't know which one of the two alternatives is better. But it would be nice and easier with a stanle number of participants ;) One way to do this would be to fix the number of participants each round…

I mean stable, not stanle

I think perhaps dividing by the total number of participants is an even better idea. That means that the average number of points per player will be the same for each round.

Website updated with the latest data from MarleysGhost.

I propose to make the 9th stage (starting Jan 1st):

Slither

Slither championship should start dec 1st, so jan 1st would be good for the Tour

Website updated with the latest data from MarleysGhost.

9th Stage, 2nd Cycle is now open for registration. Please sign up for HEX19 before JAN 1, 2012 ;)

Cheers, Ricardo

hex19 is supposed to be the 10th stage in feb

Why that, Hjallti? Slither? I see no reason to rush. I've not even counted the pools yet!

:-)

Quote from the info site.

“If a new game appears on Little Golem it will be included in the Tour one month after the 1st championship for that game has started.”

Well, there was a suggestion that slither should become part of the tour, now we have a poll running and it seems slither is going to make it… There was however no decision yet. Hex 19 is, as far as I can see, the correct game for the 9th stage. Maybe Slither could be the game for the 10th stage…, but according to me it would be better to make it as either the 12th stage or the 24th stage. Maybe we could integrate a poll about which stage it should be in together with the other poll that is running? :)

I totally disagree

The idea of the tour is to have a tournament that includes all the available games played by the participants. This intention was a bit ruined by the introduction of variants, but none the less that was the intention

At this point all* the games available except slither are in the tour. Playing Slither as next would make it again as supposed. Postponing slither would actually ruin the intentions.

Especially the suggestion to even wait until the all games have been played twice (Summer of 2013) and then have maybe 4 stages of new games next to each other seems to me totally opposite to very idea of the tour.

I agree with Hjallti why wait to the end of the cycle? I thought it is a continuous tournament. And the condition for new game to be included one month after first championships is nice since it is usually a couple of months for everyone to get familiar with the game. So since hex19 starts in january, slither should start in february.

I think we should exclude the repeating games hex, go, reversi, leaving the biggest size of those go19, hex19, rev10. Since they variants differ very little.

Instead we can think abut including variants of games that differ much from the championship version like minishogi, torishogi, toroidalgo, ewn beckword capture.

Since richyfourtytwo decided that the decision about tour should be more democratic. I propose to set up a pool about the repeating games with different board size.

And start some discussion about variants to be included. I think especially minishogi deserve Its place in the tour. It is very different from shogi, have its own championships and it is fairly popular.

After all the variants were introduced I've given up on the automatism and introduced polls for accepting new games. The automatic timing obviously isn't valid anymore either. Nevertheless I totally agree we don't have to wait till the end of the 2nd cycle. A poll is probably the best way to avoid tedious discussions. :-) I'll set up one later today.

Standings updated. Sorry for the delay! (I had the data from MarleysGhost since roughly a week, but didn't get around to uploading it.)

So, finally Slither is open for registration as the 10th Stage (2nd Cycle). The tournament will start 1. Feb. 2012 :) Please register HERE

Standings updated. Sorry for the extreme delay! (I had the data from MarleysGhost since more than 2 weeks, but didn't get around to uploading it.)

Next round should be gomoku. Ricardo, can you set up again?

The championship has switched to gomoku pro. I think we should silently switch too. Or does anyone think we need a poll?

gomoku pro is the right choice I guess, it is shorter and follows the championship rule… I guess if nobody asks a poll you can create the tournament

The 11th stage is now open for registration ;) Sorry for the delay.

The Gomoku tournament for cycle 2, stage 11 is at http://www.littlegolem.net/Ctrn.action?view=&dto.id=558.

Ouch! I was sure I registered for Slither. But I am not on.

Standings updated.

12th Stage (2nd Cycle) of Tour de Little Golem is now open for registration. We have reached REVERSI 10x10, please register now ;)

Website updated, with some new norms. All thanks to MarleysGhost as usual.

13th Stage (2nd Cycle) of Tour de Little Golem is now open for registration HERE

Cheers, Ricardo

Ricardo, el tour de littlegolem havannah esta duplicado.

I thought of that while riding my bike.

Albert Einstein

On the Theory of Relativity.

I sent standings to richyfourtytwo on 2012-04-02. I don’t know what’s happened to them.
Does anyone have an alternative web site we could use for standings? There's a separate page for each participant, so the web site would have to allow the uploading of hundreds of pages without a manual step for each page.

Sorry MarleysGhost, I must have missed that email.

But I just logged in to announce having a break from littlegolem anyway.

With two partners I have just started a collaborative literary project (www.mygnia.de, have a look if you can read German). I have to do development and maintenance tasks for that on top of my normal job. Finally I also started writing for that project. I hardly find the time to sleep, let alone make my moves here.

I'll try to finish my current games without timing out, although I can't promise. I hope someone can offer webspace and maintenance for the tour results. I trust the community to be able to contimue the tour as long as players are still interested in it without a moderator.

I have had an enormous amount of fun here and always enjoyed the intelligent (on average at least ;-) ) community.

This is not a goodbye forever. I'll surely be back one day. (And I might even read the forums from time to time while I'm away.

OK, so should we continue the Tour in May, or should we make a break? How many are interested in continuing and would like to participate? How do we publish the results? Maybe we should take a pause till we have a solution…?

I suggest continuing in May. I could see taking a break to allow the Go19 tournament from cycle 1 to complete, but I doubt a one-month break would do it. :)
How about if I post just the main standings table in a forum topic (after converting from HTML table to textile table), without the individual player pages?

Yes, I think that is a good idea to have the results in a forum :) So, let's see then… May will be the Havannah and in June it will be Chess… Maybe we should try these two and then see how the interest looks like…

So the 14th Stage (2nd Cycle) of Tour de Little Golem will start June 1st. The tour has arrived to the Chess stage. Here you find more INFORMATION about the tour and here you find the STANDINGS and finally here you can REGISTER for the CHESS tournament :)

Cheers

The 15th Stage (2nd Cycle) of Tour de Little Golem has started and it is the Golem Word Game. Please REGISTER HERE.

I'm sorry for the delay. The Stage will start July 1st. ;)

One more week to go for registering for Golem Word Game. Not many registered so far, please come and reserve your place ;)

TWIXT, the 16th Stage (2nd Cycle) of Tour de Little Golem is now open for REGISTRATION Please register before August 1.

Here you find more
INFORMATION about the tour and here the STANDINGS

bump

Go13, the 17th Stage (2nd Cycle) of Tour de Little Golem is now open for REGISTRATION

Here you find more INFORMATION about the tour and here the STANDINGS

Reversi 8, the 18th Stage (2nd Cycle) of Tour de Little Golem is now open for REGISTRATION

Wyps numeric, the 19th Stage (2nd Cycle) of Tour de Little Golem is now open for REGISTRATION.

THANKS MarleysGhost!!! I'm travelling so had difficulties to open the tour…

Hex 13 is the 20th Stage (2nd Cycle) of Tour de Little Golem and is now open for REGISTRATION

Connect 6 will be the first game of the Tour de Little Golem in the new year. This is the 21st stage of the second cycle. Please register here before the end of this year.

“Four in a row” is now open for
REGISTRATION
This is the 22nd stage of the second cycle.
Please run to the REGISTRATION OFFICE

NOW, Lines of Action
the 23rd Stage of the Second Cycle is open for
REGISTRATION

The FINAL (24th) stage of the second cycle is now open for
REGISTRATION

Should we continue the Tour with a third cycle? In the 2nd cycle we had 24 games. Are there any games that should be added in a third cycle?
What do you think?

Cycle 1 finished on 2012-10-17 (I assume. That's when cycle 1's Go 19 finished.) There are four ongoing tournaments in cycle 2: Go 19 (16 games), Four in a row (1 game), Lines of Action (1 game) and Shogi (13 games).