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

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.