Regular readers may have noticed that tourneygeek has, of late, been rather long on background concepts and philosophizing, and short on the empirical analysis of tournament designs. There’s a backlog of empirical work that I’ve promised, but not delivered, including fairness (D) and the analysis of partially-seeded brackets.
The reason for this is that I’m in the process of overhauling my tourney simulator – this time, rewriting it from scratch on a new platform. My past efforts have been coded in an admirable little language called Chipmunk Basic. Chipmunk is endearingly similar to some of the simpler languages that were in use some 35 years ago when I first learned to program. But my simulator has grown to well over 200 lines, and had accumulated a lot of the sludge that’s the real dirt in quick-and-dirty coding. I’d begun to dread wading into it to add new features. So it was time to overhaul it anyway, and I figured that this time I’d take the trouble to use a real integrated development environment. And this has meant finally learning the basic tidiness expected of real programmers.
So, I’ve been in programming boot camp for the last few days, starting, as tradition demands, by writing a “Hello World!” application. It will be a few days more before I know enough to recreate my simulator. But soon I’ll catch up on the empirical work I’ve promised, and forge ahead with more.
So, sorry for the delay, but watch this space for new and better tournament analyses soon.
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