- Room assignments within each division will performed randomly, with prizes distributed evenly among all rooms in each division.
56% of the total purse will be awarded to division one competitors, 24% to division two competitors. The remaining 20% of the prize purse will be awarded to 20 competitors chosen uniformly, at random, from both divisions.- Approximately 20 competitors will be assigned to each room.
The first place coder in each room will receive 100% the room award.- In the event of a tie for any prize winning position, the sum of the awards of the tied competitors will be distributed evenly.
- Prizes will only be awarded to competitors who finish with greater than zero scores.
We can assume SRM 537 and SRM 540 to be similar in number of registrants for each divisor to SRM 533, which was recent, also on Saturday and got full registrants. In that match, there 36 division 1 rooms and 52 division 2 rooms. Under the new rules, that would translate to 77 USD given to division 1 room winners and 23 USD for division 2 room winners. Note also that the random part of the prize will be 50 USD.
Something that I do not like about the method is that there are usually a lot more division 2 coders with positive scores than division 1 coders with positive score. This means that if you are in division 2, you will be a lot more likely to win the random prize.
The good thing is that at least this time room winners would get more than the editorial writer. Which would not have been true for the previous rules. As a comparison, I estimated today that with the old rules, first, second and third room places in division 1 would get 43, 26 and 17 USD, whilst first and second places ind division 2 would get 18 and 12 USD.
Giving money to room winners only is not the fairest of strategies possible. I mean, what if you are put in the same room as Petr? You are not going to get any room prize :). The random 50 USD will kind of compensate that.
With some (understatement) luck, I might get first in room and the 50 USD prize, that would add up to 127 USD, which is not bad at all. Will really look forward to this match.
In my opinion, the optimal way to do this would be to give everyone loterry tickets for 100 draws of 50 USD each (Or something like that). And give coders with higher rank more lottery tickets (IE: All coders with 0.0 score receive 1 ticket, all coders with negative score no ticket, first place 100 tickets, etc.)
An approach that is almost completely random does not sound very fair at first. Note however, that all the approaches used are random. The room assignments can really change the outcome of the match. Not only because a room could appear such that only blue coders are active in it. But also because of the challenge phase. There have been matches in which some people got 10+ succesful challenges whilst some rooms didn't have any wrong solution. During a match, there is a lot of random noise, and I think that trying to give prizes deterministically increases the effect of the random noise. It is better to control the random noise instead. But this is all just an opinion. There is also the fact that money prizes are there probably more to attract participation rather than reward top places, a totally random algorithm would do that just as well. If the random algorithm gives more tickets for better ranked players, then with time the better coders would receive more accumulated money than the worse coders. But it is not very practical until we return to the day in which money SRMs were the rule rather than the exception...
