I guess it worked okay and by what you said it can work even better. But personally I was not feeling it. It was like walking around in Bizarro world. Looking at all the strange things that I did not know what they were.hgm wrote: A record number of players, this time, even if you don't count the one that had to withdraw after two rounds because of engine trouble!
We have to evaluate how we liked the McMahon pairing system. I think that in any case it has to be tweeked so that there are an even number of top engines that get maximum initial points, as it would be unfair to the one that gets 0.5 pt less and gets added to the group to play a top engine anyway. I also think that with such a large field perhaps only the top 1/3 should get equal points, and it should start to tail off from there. I guess it really depends on the rating distribution; in an advanced system you would calculate where the chance that a player can win gets below a given threshold (say 1%), and start decreasing the initial points linearly from there.
Another conclusion is that the gap between searching and non-searching engines is too large, so that the non-searching engines are essentially BYEs for the others. Making the luck factor for how many of those you get paired with for the tail of the searching engines substantial.
Edit: Random movers should only play each other until they have played all their games. Then they should play the lowest 'real' engines. Otherwise I think that they are okay to have in the tournament.
