Sunday, May 1, 2022

Sprouts 2022: Extra Musings

Sprouts 2022 was awesome!  It was a bit of a bummer to be virtual instead of in person, but there was a bright side to being virtual: we had a bunch of attendees and even talks that we wouldn't have had otherwise!  (We had two attendees from South America!)

Congratulations to our Popping Balloons tournament winners!

  • Craig Tennenhouse won our human tournament.  There were ten participants.  We did four rounds of Swiss, then cut to the top two (Craig and Svenja).  Since one of those two (Svenja) had beaten the other, we decided that Craig would have to win twice in a row in the final to win the whole thing, which he did.
  • Ian Grenville's player, NinePiecesOrLess won the computer tournament as the only participant.
  • NinePiecesOrLess defeated Craig in the "John Henry" match.  Congratulations to Ian Grenville!

Here are some things I learned this year:

  • I need to create a webpage to organize tournaments among humans.
  • "Partizan" vs "Partisan" is not originally a UK English vs American English thing.  Partizan was purposefully chosen for Combinatorial Games because of the political meaning behind partisan.  Partisan may have been accidentally adopted by US gamesters as a misunderstanding.  I guess we have to go update this in the book!
  • We need to manage a mailing list of attendees.  I passed out information to attendees as they signed up, but then didn't email out any reminders as the event drew near.
  • When undergrads are presenting, I think it would be helpful for them to tell their major and year, for context.  We had some great presentations from students outside of Math and CS.
  • I need to figure out how to attract more computer-player submissions.  I'm willing to take any advice on this!  (I know, at least, that we'll need to announce it sooner.)

We don't have any of the details figured out for next year yet.  It may be partially in-person and partially virtual.  No matter what happens, I'm looking forward to future years of Sprouts! 

No comments:

Post a Comment