PGSS 1999 Go Fish tournament results

And now, to explain the method...

The qualifiers

Before qualifying teams, I first fixed all the programs so that they did not incur errors.

To qualify teams, I played each of the 39 entries against Spot 100 times. A team received a point when they beat Spot and half a point when they tied. The scores leveled out at 29 points; any team scoring above 30 points, therefore, qualifies for the finals.

In my experience, some players who do very poorly with this test still do very well against other (non-random) players. Thus I draw the line fairly low. This has the disadvantage of qualifying a couple of teams that really have a strategy solidly in Level 1, but I don't make that judgement for the tournament.

Results from the qualifiers:

W/L/T	score	team	members
81/ 8/11	86.5	nck	Nathan Keim
60/28/12	66.0	zanderso	Zach Anderson, Harold Hsiung
55/32/13	62.5	and_lose_to	Shawn Badlani, Brian O'Kelly
56/33/11	61.5	osoong	Oliver Soong
54/32/14	61.0	rdore	Richard Dore
49/33/18	58.0	mim	Mike Mandel
47/41/12	53.0	Grrr	Jeremy Davidson, Andrew Grier, Eric Wang
40/47/13	46.5	Rosswell	Ross Burton
36/45/19	45.5	seltzer2	Andrew Chi, Michelle Kinder, Mike Seltzer
32/58/10	37.0	Heron	Ali Huff, Harini Raghupathi, Erin Tyndall
30/63/ 7	33.5	happy_dance	Helen Curry, Jess Reynolds, Anne Warner
29/65/ 6	33.0	HeyBaby	Ruth Carlitz, Susie James, Bronwyn Uber
29/65/ 6	33.0	stupid	Colin Dawson, Pat Moeller, Joy Tsai
28/65/ 7	31.5	pal	Laura Babcock, Pius Uzamere, Ali Yurkovic
25/62/13	31.5	krunch	Onny Chatterjee, Zach Firth, Saurabh Sanghvi
25/64/11	30.5	AC	Tony D'Amelio, Christine Edmonds

Finals

To get the final results, each player played each other 200 times. Then I look closely at the results and try to find an ordering that makes sense. From there I had the top six players play each other another 2000 times. Where the results were close, I added another 3000 games to make sure of the numbers. The top two, since they were quite close, played each other another 5000 times, for a total of more than 10200 games.

From there, I ranked the players carefully. This requires some eyeball judgement, since players do not always fall neatly into a linear ranking. My judgements in this arena are final.

The following table reports the results. The percentage of points won by a player has been multiplied by 2000, so that for each pair, the player winning at least half the points has a four-digit score, and players winning less has a three-digit score.