Capture the Flag Society - Week 1 News

For the first game of the weekend, we split into two teams:

Team Taliban:

Zephyr, David, Chronos, The Viscount, The Duke, Mike and Simeon

Team Bavarian Fire Drill:

Dan, Grand Theft Walrus, Alchemist, Cesy, lmm, Philip and Steven

Each team elected a General (the first generals were The Viscount for Team Taliban, and Philip for Team Bavarian Fire Drill), who was only allowed to carry light weaponry.

The rules were such that a round ends when one of the Generals die, and other people respawn after 5 mins, or when the round ends. Each team had a base, one on either side of the valley, and the Generals were not allowed to leave their side of the valley for any reason.

This game was the main game of the weekend, a simple deathmatch with 5 minute respawn times in a forest on Cannock Chase.

There were a few restrictions imposed on alliances, such that pairs were the largest allowed, and certain alliances among the more experienced players were not allowed.

The event finished with the following results (where the killer is along the top, and the 'killee' is down the side):

A graphical representation of this is also available.

To ensure that there would be no arguing, the players were invited to submit a scoring algorithm each to be used with this game. The results of these would then be taken into account using the Condorcet Method.

Seven of the players submitted an algorithm for use:

lmm

"First, I calculate a 'kill value' for each pair of people; your first kill of a person is worth 1, then each subsequent kill is worth 0.6 * the value of the previous kill, so e.g. if you kill someone 3 times this is worth 1 + 0.6 + 0.6 * 0.6 = 1.96. This is done to prevent 'farming'.

Then, we apply the Google pagerank algorithm: we draw a Markov chain whose nodes are all the players, where the arrows go from those who died to the people who killed them, in proportion to these values. So e.g. if Philip killed Simeon twice, Alchemist killed him once and no-one else killed him, arrows would go from Simeon to Philip with probability 1.6/2.6 and to Alchemist with probability 1/2.6. If someone was never killed, arrows go from them to everyone else with equal probability. Next we take the transition matrix A for this chain, and use it to generate a new matrix B=0.9A + 0.1 * 1 / n, where 1 is the matrix all of whose entries are 1 and n is the number of players. We solve the Markov chain with transition matrix B to get a stationary state vector x, which I call the 'kill scores'.

The kill scores measure the value of your kills, but take no account of your deaths, so to penalise deaths each person's score is then multiplied by , where d is the number of times they died, to give the final scores."

Zephyr

This is

Grand Theft Walrus

This is taken to 1 d.p.

Alchemist

This is , where is the number of times a has killed b

Philip

This is simply Kills - Deaths

Simeon

This is simply the number of kills, with draws won by the person with the fewest deaths

Mike

"Take each player, divide an arbitrary number (e.g. 100, the same for everyone) by the number of deaths plus one, and then allocate those points equally between the people who killed them, plus one portion to them (i.e. if I kill Alchemist twice, and Philip kills him once, I get 50 points from Alchemist, and Philip and Alchemist get 25 points each)"

The results of these various algorithms were as follows:

lmm:

Rank:	Name:	Score:
1	Zephyr	0.08721266431324681
2	Philip	0.08267002497601961
3	Grand Theft Walrus	0.07188646927912169
4	Steven	0.06580834751130803
5	Simeon	0.06379935284143257
6	Alchemist	0.06143346501815268
7	Chronos	0.05580312467810443
8	Cesy	0.05387573408439894
9	Mike	0.04917295653809635
10	The Duke	0.035622031288493367
11	David	0.03019332161710857
12	Dan	0.029492097974108688
13	lmm	0.019654521598892482
14	The Viscount	0.016318099494654164

Zephyr:

Rank:	Name:	Score:
1	Philip	2.42
2	Grand Theft Walrus	2.17
3	Zephyr	2.15
4	Simeon	1.41
5	Steven	1.23
6	The Duke	1.19
7	Chronos	0.98
8	David	0.89
9	lmm	0.87
10	Dan	0.79
11	The Viscount	0.77
12	Alchemist	0.75
13	Mike	0.735
14	Cesy	0.732

Grand Theft Walrus:

Rank:	Name:	Score:
1	Zephyr	3.6
2	Philip	3.4
3	Grand Theft Walrus	3.2
4	Simeon	2
5	Steven	1.6
6	The Duke	1.4
7	Alchemist	1.2
=8	Mike	1
=8	David	1
=8	Cesy	1
=8	Chronos	1
12	Dan	0.8
13	lmm	0.6
14	The Viscount	0.4

Alchemist:

Rank:	Name:	Score:
1	Zephyr	446.25
2	Philip	350
3	Grand Theft Walrus	198.75
4	Steven	115
5	Chronos	90
6	Simeon	68.75
7	The Duke	30
8	Alchemist	-47.5
9	Mike	-132.5
10	lmm	-177.5
11	Dan	-210
12	David	-235
13	Cesy	-280
14	The Viscount	-287.5

Philip:

Rank:	Name:	Score:
1	Philip	7
=2	Zephyr	6
=2	Grand Theft Walrus	6
4	Simeon	2
=5	Steven	1
=5	The Duke	1
7	Chronos	-1
=8	David	-2
=8	lmm	-2
=10	The Viscount	-3
=10	Dan	-3
=12	Mike	-4
=12	Alchemist	-4
=12	Cesy	-4

Simeon:

Rank:	Name:	Kills:	Deaths:
1	Philip	13	6
2	Grand Theft Walrus	12	6
3	Alchemist	11	15
4	Zephyr	10	4
5	Simeon	10	8
6	Mike	7	11
7	Steven	6	5
8	Cesy	6	10
9	David	5	7
10	Chronos	4	5
11	Dan	4	7
12	The Duke	3	2
13	lmm	3	5
14	The Viscount	2	5

Mike:

Rank:	Name:	Score:
1	Philip	1.72
2	Grand Theft Walrus	1.64
3	Alchemist	1.63
4	Simeon	1.45
5	Zephyr	1.38
6	Steven	0.96
7	Cesy	0.93
8	Mike	0.85
9	The Duke	0.78
10	Chronos	0.712
11	David	0.710
12	Dan	0.48
13	lmm	0.46
14	The Viscount	0.29

Therefore, the overall result of this game (using the Condorcet Method) is as follows:

1. Philip
2. Grand Theft Walrus
3. Zephyr
4. Simeon
5. Steven
6. Alchemist
7. Chronos
8. The Duke
9. Mike
10. David
11. Cesy
12. Dan
13. lmm
14. The Viscount

We played several rounds of Capture the Flag across a quarry. We found that the wind was quite strong, and therefore the side of the base that was easily approachable was in fact the easiest to defend, since the wind was in the favour of the defenders.

We then had a short deathmatch to finish off the weekend.