Life In 19x19

Does your club keep a ladder? If so, what software is used?

By ladder, I do not mean a ladder on a go board, but a numbered/prioritized list of players. The list keeps track of club games and can be regularly updated to process results of games played and changes in playing strength. Sorry, I am not an native English speaker; do I make myself clear? I haven't been able to find such software.

I recently obtained an excellent spreadsheet for this purpose, but perhaps there is some dedicated software around?

Sorry if this was asked before. I was not able to find more about this on this forum.

The Online Go Server has ladders for 19x19, 13x13, and 9x9. See https://online-go.com/ladders. Since this is an online "club" their ladders must be computer managed. Maybe you could find out how they do it.

I found this reference after making the above post. Here https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic ... 12l0LpLItY are descriptions of ladder systems used by different clubs. Apparently none of these clubs use software. These systems could be set up using Excel I guess.

The Cambridge junior club stick/velcro names onto a piece of cloth that gets hung up vertically each session and rolled up when not in use.

The university club have one on their website. I imagine they rolled their own software. https://cugosoc.soc.srcf.net/ladder/

Uberdude wrote: The university club have one on their website. I imagine they rolled their own software. https://cugosoc.soc.srcf.net/ladder/

I would be happy if I can get a copy of the software which must be behind this webpage.

It should be fairly easy task to write such a software. (I might even consider doing it as a "hobby" project, if someone presents the requirements - this is not a promise or commitment to anything)

tj86430 wrote:It should be fairly easy task to write such a software. (I might even consider doing it as a "hobby" project, if someone presents the requirements - this is not a promise or commitment to anything)

I was thinking the same, starting from scratch can often be easier than adapting existing code.

For a ladder all we really need is a file with the participants and a function to bump people. Ruby is a good language for this, a website can be assembled quickly with Rails and hosted for free at Heroku.

Initially an API can be developed like host/addplayer/name and host/registerwin/namewinner/nameloser

tj86430 wrote:It should be fairly easy task to write such a software. (I might even consider doing it as a "hobby" project, if someone presents the requirements - this is not a promise or commitment to anything)

Ideas for such a project?
I can probably give you the requirements. What programming language do you think might be appropriate?

Given that there is so much software for go, and much of it is even open source, I am surprised there is not yet a freely available piece of software for this.

sybob wrote:What programming language do you think might be appropriate?

Without seeing the requirements, I would probably go with PHP & MySQL (or MariaDB), so it could be deployed on virtually every website hosting provider.

Edwin Brady wrote a piece of ladder software. https://durhamgo.club/faq.php
If you tell him that your club worships Ivor the Engine you're bound to get a positive response from him.

tj86430 wrote:

sybob wrote:What programming language do you think might be appropriate?

Without seeing the requirements, I would probably go with PHP & MySQL (or MariaDB), so it could be deployed on virtually every website hosting provider.

Would you be willing and able to make this?

sybob wrote:

tj86430 wrote:

sybob wrote:What programming language do you think might be appropriate?

Without seeing the requirements, I would probably go with PHP & MySQL (or MariaDB), so it could be deployed on virtually every website hosting provider.

Would you be willing and able to make this?

I sent you a PM

I've found that tournament software like McMahon (by Christoph Gerlach) is actually quite suitable for this, as long as you're willing to periodically reset (which IMO is a good idea anyway).

The idea is:

Every 3 months you start a "new tournament" of 13 rounds which is a new season. At this point you input all present players with their current rank and mark them as playing in the current round. In every subsequent round you add new players as needed and mark the present players as playing in the current round and absent players as not playing.

You can then let the program pair normally and it will then do some things you want. It will
1. Try to avoid pairing players that have already played.
2. Try to minimize strength differences in the pairing.

After 13 rounds, you can, if you want, declare one or more winners (most wins, best win percentage with at least X played, etc)

Also, you can publish a wall list on your website after every round if you want.

The reset every three months allows you to take into account that players may have gotten stronger or weaker in the mean time (also taking into account tournaments they've visited).

Don't set any upper or lower bar (otherwise the "strenght difference" minimalization breaks)

You can set McMahon to give full handicap if you want, and you can let it base the handicap on the rank (rather than McMahon score). Or base it on the McMahon score if you want it to change based on results during the season.

This is a good, free software way to get a "ranking" of the players in the club but does it allow a function which club ladders I am familiar with have, namely the challenge feature. The way that works is a member challenges another member to a ladder game and if the lower ranked player defeats the higher rated player the players switch places on the ladder.