SamurAI Coding 2019–20 Qualifying Round Rules

Draft, 2019/11/17
IPSJ Programming Contest Committee

This document describes the system of the qualifying round and the advancement criteria for SamurAI Coding 2019–20 contest.

Qualifying Round System

The qualifying round is conducted as a round-robin tournament, in which all the participating teams play one match (two games exchanging the initial positions of the agents) against all the other teams, as long as the number of participating teams allows it. If the number of teams is too many for a single round-robin tournament, the qualification round will be organized with two stages.

In a two-stage qualifier, participating teams are divided into several groups for the first stage. A round-robin tournament is conducted in each of the groups. Around 30 teams with higher ranks in the first-stage groups are advanced to the final qualifier, which is conducted as a round-robin tournament again.

Due to the limited time and resource, the numbers of teams in each of the first stage are restricted to at most around 30. The number of teams for the first stage groups are averaged as far as possible. The same number of teams are advanced to the final qualifier from each group.

Below is an example of the organization of the qualifying round with different number of participating teams.

Total # of teams	First Stage				Final Qualifier
Total # of teams	groups	teams	advanced	matches	teams	match's
100	4	26	8	1300	32	496
150	10	16	3	1200	30	435
200	15	14	2	1365	30	435
300	30	10	1	1350	30	435

Round-Robin Tournaments

A round-robin tournament with n teams consists of n−1 stages, each with different opponents. When the number of teams in the tournament is odd, a player provided by the organizer is added to make it even, making each of the team play against all the other teams.

All the match's in each stage use the same game field, and different fields are used in different stages.

The ranks of a round-robin tournaments are decided according to the following criteria, in this order.

Total points:: In each stage, match winners are given two points and losers are given no points. When the match is drawn, both will be given one point.
Gold acquisition differences:: The total of the differences of the amount of gold acquired by the team and the opponent teams for all the stages.

When two or more teams are still ranked the same with the above criteria, ranks are decided by drawing lots.

Game Fields

Game fields used in the qualifying round will satisfy the following.

The field size is at least 6x6 and at most 12x12

The maximum number of steps in a game 100

Think time limit is 10,000 milliseconds for each agent

Multiple candidates game fields will be uploaded on the web page of the contest. The locations and amounts of hidden treasures, however, will not be set yet. For each stages of the preliminary round, one of the candidates will be picked, hidden treasures will be randomly added to it, and the resultant game field will be used for all the matches of the stage.

Advancement to the World Finals

Sixteen teams in total will be advanced to the world finals. Eight or more higher-ranked teams in the qualification round (in the final qualifier, when the qualification is organized with two rounds) will be selected. In addition, at most eight teams consisting only of members born on or after April 2nd, 1994, will be selected, considering results in the qualifying round and diversities.