Talk:King maker

Ah, I see what you mean now. The "king-making" references I found were to non-winners intentionally manipulating results to dictate the winner, which is obviously not the case in the RoboRumble. I'm fairly confident DrussGT has the strongest APS in every demographic of RoboRumble participants - low, mid, high-end bots, surfers, Pattern matchers, etc - so simply altering the composition of the rumble would not knock him off his throne. His strength is quite clear and not all that subjective, if you ask me. Only submitting bots with hard-coded behaviors against DrussGT could have an impact, and such a move would probably not go un-noticed and the community as a whole would intervene.

But it is true that with a drastically different RoboRumble population, say only DrussGT's worst 5 matchups =), another bot like Shadow could conceivably be called #1. And it's also reasonable if you want to view results as "a win is a win" - I personally quite like that view, and agree that the APS RoboRumble is more of a shared "challenge" than a direct competition. Though I do consider it a fair challenge, and one in which I still aspire to be #1 again some day. ;)

An important point to make in any scoring system that applies a winner-take-all view of each matchup is that we'd have to significantly alter priority battles to get accurate rankings. For close matchups, you may need 100 or more battles to determine a winner. There really is quite a lot of variance. Given that, we'd probably want to just start a separate participants list with only current and/or strong bots. Or even run a weekly tournament where each match is like best-of-99 or something.

--Voidious 03:48, 15 August 2011 (UTC)