New Atropine release - 1.2.0

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Graeme Cole
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New Atropine release - 1.2.0

Post by Graeme Cole »

Atropine, the program many co-event organisers use to record scores and generate fixtures, had until very recently not had a new version since March 2020. For some reason it didn't get much use after then.

Anyway, it's back with such renewed vigour that even the middle component of the version number has changed. If you run a co-event or are planning to do so, this may be of interest to you.

Atropine 1.2.0 download page

Improvements for organisers:
  • Better diagnostics on startup failure. Are you the 100th person to try to run atropine.py from inside the zip file without extracting it first? It will now notice this and complain at you!
  • Swiss fixture generator improved in both speed and results. For small to medium-sized tournaments you probably won't even need to wait the maximum 30 seconds. I've also tweaked how it evaluates player groups so that two people who are on exactly the same standings position are less likely to stick to each other like glue to the detriment of surrounding players.
  • New standings table ranking methods. Wins-and-points is still the default but there are now a selection of ranking methods from this article.
  • The text-exported standings table, which is the one normally posted on C4C by the organiser, now adds a note next to the finalists to say who won and lost, to explain why they might appear from their wins and points totals to be in the "wrong" positions.
  • When you ask to generate fixtures, a warning is now shown if the number of active players isn't a multiple of 2 or 3.
  • The "edit fixtures" page, reachable from the main result entry screen, can now add or delete fixtures, which you couldn't do previously.
  • Some other minor improvements and bug fixes.
There are also improvements to the public display. If you're a player but not an organiser, this is usually the only bit you see...
  • New fonts on the public display screen, which are a bit clearer. Using a condensed font isn't as important on newer-shaped monitors. If you want the old condensed font, the organiser can switch back to that in Display Setup.
  • If the tournament has 36 or more players (this is configurable), then when fixtures are generated we show the name-to-table index rather than the list of fixtures. The name-to-table index is an alphabetical list of names, each with the table number alongside it. In large tournaments it's much easier to find your table number on that than on a list of fixtures sorted by table number.
  • Public-facing standings table now scrolls faster. This is by popular demand, which in Atropine terms means two or more people.
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L'oisleatch McGraw
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Re: New Atropine release - 1.2.0

Post by L'oisleatch McGraw »

Excellent news!
Does this mean that all I need is for *one* more person to request the ability to run Bristol-style QF groupings via Atropine, for it to be added?!
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Gavin Chipper
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Re: New Atropine release - 1.2.0

Post by Gavin Chipper »

Not that I've ever run a tournament but well done on all this.
Graeme Cole wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 7:52 pm I've also tweaked how it evaluates player groups so that two people who are on exactly the same standings position are less likely to stick to each other like glue to the detriment of surrounding players.
So tables weren't just sorted by their relative positions but by the amount of gravitational pull they exerted on each other? And with two point masses occupying the same space, that sounds pretty heavy.
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Graeme Cole
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Re: New Atropine release - 1.2.0

Post by Graeme Cole »

L'oisleatch McGraw wrote: Tue Aug 16, 2022 12:04 am Excellent news!
Does this mean that all I need is for *one* more person to request the ability to run Bristol-style QF groupings via Atropine, for it to be added?!
One more person for me to count it as popular demand, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be added.

To clarify, do you mean the tournament format where after a few games the players are sorted into divisions of 8 people based on standings position, and each person then plays a quarter final against another player in their division, then a semi-final (against a winner if you won your QF, against a loser if you didn't), then a final (against someone with the same QF-SF win-loss record)?

I don't like to confuse things by calling this "Bristol-style", because although that system is often used at Bristol-style events, it's not what the term means. Bristol-style just means everyone faces the front and plays with the same letters and numbers - it's completely independent of how the tournament is structured. Many Bristol-style events have been run without the divisions thing (Reading, Milton Keynes, etc), and you can even run a Lincoln-style event with the divisions thing (Co:Leam 2013).

Incidentally, I don't think this is a good way of structuring a tournament, because it constrains your overall finishing position very early on with no way of climbing back up the table. However, that's just my own opinion, and it's not the reason why there isn't a fixture generator for it. The reason there's no fixture generator for it is because there are weird rules about what happens when a division's size isn't a power of two, which I've never understood enough to put them into code.

You actually can administer such a tournament in Atropine, it just requires a bit more manual input than you might expect.
  • Play your first N rounds as normal, using the random or Swiss fixture generator as appropriate.
  • Go to Divisions under the General Setup menu in the sidebar, and divide the players into the appropriate number of divisions by standings position using the controls at the bottom. If you want to put an unexpected number of players into a division, you can always set a player's division manually on their Player page (General Setup -> Players -> click the relevant player).
  • Use the "Raw" fixture generator to generate the Quarter-Final matches you want, then play them. Use it again to generate the Semi-Final matches, then play them. Repeat once more to generate the Final matches. At each stage you'll have to specify who plays whom - it won't infer this from previous results.
(I now realise there's a bug which stops things working if you divide players into divisions mid-tournament while using one of the more exotic ranking methods, so expect a version 1.2.1 at some point with that and potentially other stuff fixed.)
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Graeme Cole
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Re: New Atropine release - 1.2.0

Post by Graeme Cole »

Gavin Chipper wrote: Tue Aug 16, 2022 12:56 pm Not that I've ever run a tournament but well done on all this.
Graeme Cole wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 7:52 pm I've also tweaked how it evaluates player groups so that two people who are on exactly the same standings position are less likely to stick to each other like glue to the detriment of surrounding players.
So tables weren't just sorted by their relative positions but by the amount of gravitational pull they exerted on each other? And with two point masses occupying the same space, that sounds pretty heavy.
Suppose you have someone in 1st, someone in 2nd, three people on joint 3rd, and someone in 6th. For the sake of simplicity we'll assume none of these players have played each other yet and they're all on the same number of wins.

It used to be that [ (1st, 2nd, 6th), (3rd, 3rd, 3rd) ] happened to get a lower penalty than [ (1st, 2nd, 3rd), (3rd, 3rd, 6th) ], so the former arrangement got chosen, often to the surprise of the player in 6th. Now it no longer does.

If you're wondering which "3rd" gets chosen to go on the higher table: the Swiss fixture generator now shuffles clusters of players on the same position into a random order, so they're all equally likely to be chosen.
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Graeme Cole
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Re: New Atropine release - 1.2.1

Post by Graeme Cole »

Atropine 1.2.1 is out now!

There are a few improvements, but the main ones are:
  • As of Atropine 1.2.1, you no longer need to add Prune players. Ever. Prune automatically appears on as many tables as necessary when you generate fixtures. Just enter your human players, stop caring about having a multiple of two or three, and the fixture generator will do the rest. If you want to, you can still give the Prune a silly name on the Advanced Setup page.
  • There's a Player Check-In page, accessible from the sidebar at any point before you generate the first games. This is a page with a little button for every player which withdraws/unwithdraws them, in the hope that it's useful for keeping track of who's arrived and who hasn't.
  • Before the first games are generated, the public-facing display now by default shows a list of unwithdrawn players, with an encouragement to let the host know if you've turned up but your name isn't on the list.
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Re: New Atropine release - 1.2.0

Post by Fiona T »

Graeme - we love you.
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