Kalaha servers

In your second assignment you will write a Kalaha computer player. If you haven't written one yet, go to the assignment sheet: and find out how. Once you designed a player of your own, you can test it here in the class wide tournament which will give you plenty of hints and ideas how to improve your player (at least if you didn't get yourself on the number one spot in the first shot) and hopefully some fun while watching your player working through the ranks.

The game servers verse players by a system similar to a Swiss tournament, which ensures that an approximate ranking for a new player is found swiftly. Players with smaller numbers of matches will be drawn first and versed against a player of similar rank and against whom he wasn't competing before. Eventually all players will compete against everybody else. Thus this system does not prevent full evaluation, yet ensures early feedback for everybody. In the current distributed server setup, up to 16 simultaneous matches are executed at any time.

Once you submit a new player all your results will be deleted and a fresh round of matches will be performed with this new player. Submitting a player works via the submit command as detailed in the assignment sheet. You can submit a new player any time - even if your player is currently engaged in a dramatic match. A new player will be recognized in about 1-2 minutes, its status will change to "New submission" and all its scores are deleted. To run all tests for a new player will take 5-7 minutes and the status for the player will be displayed as "Test execution" during this phase. After that, the status of the player will change to either "Compilation error", "Execution error" or "Executing".

For privacy reasons, your names or UIds are never displayed on the server pages, but instead each player is identified by a number. Your player number has been e-mailed to you. It is perfectly fine to reveal your player number to anybody you like to - but this is your decision, not ours. You can take your own player out of the tournament by submitting the dummy player which comes with your student code template.

All pages are automatically updating on a 15 seconds basis. There is little point pressing reload more frequently as the pages are also only pushed to the web server (maximally) every 15 seconds.

The tournament matrix

The Kalaha game server status is displayed in a number of ways. An overview of all completed matches of players which rank in the top 40 is given by the tournament matrix page which is also fully linked to all other information about your players. The entry in the matrix indicates the outcome of the game between the player in this row against the player in this column. The matrix is kept sorted by player ranks at all times. Thus the top right part of the matrix will have more wins in it. You can click on a player number and the current status for this player will appear. You can also click on an individual match (indicated according to its outcome by either: Win, Tie or Loss) and see the full transcript for this match. Matches which are currently running () or ended in an error state () do not provide a current transcript.

Typical stages of the tournament matrix

Early on as well as during the middle part of the tournament most matches are played amongst players of similar ranks. As players usually change ranks after every match, there is always a chain of matches were players move to a new rank and then verse a player close to this new rank. Hence the active games () are clustered around the diagonal for the best part of the tournament:

During the later phase of the tournament, players begin to verse more and more players which are of distant ranks. Hence the active games are now more spread out across the whole matrix:

New (and re-submitted) players will (after test compilations and test executions) enter the game matrix with a large number of matches being played simultaneously:

A completed tournament usually sets most players to rather similar ranks compared to earlier during the tournament:

Player focus pages

By clicking on a player number you can bring up a page which focuses on just one player:

This can be useful to quickly analyse where most pebbles have been lost. Like in the tournament matrix, clicking on the "Win", "Loss" or "Tie" fields will bring up the according match transcripts.

Player ranks and statistics

The complete list of all players and their statistics is found on the overall ranking page. Players with equal win ratios are distinguished by the number of pebbles which they conquered.