Final knockout tournament clarification

[Algorhythm-sxv]

Hi, I noticed that the FAQ mentions that

Some percentage of the top bots will then be promoted to a second knock-out tournament

Is a knock-out format really appropriate? My concern is that a knock-out tournament cannot determine any placement except the top bot (i.e. you get no information about the second-best bot, since the second-best bot can be paired with the best bot and get knocked out early).

I feel that being able to definitively rank the top engines, as well as quantify strength differences between them would provide more interesting material for a video as well as more satisfying results for the competitors.

As one possible alternative to a knock-out tournament, TCEC (the premier computer chess competition) uses a multiple double-round-robin format, where each engine will play N openings from both sides against all other engines. The drawback of this particular format is that the number of games grows quite quickly with the number of competitors. An N-times double round robin with 32 engines would require nearly 2000*N games to complete. Depending on the number of cores available for the tournament this may not be feasible.

Other suggestions and discussions are welcome!

[SebLague]

I totally agree that round robin would be the ideal format, but I am concerned about how long it would take to run. Will make a final decision once I'm able to get a sense of the number of engines that are in contention for the top spot. I am open to hearing any suggestions though.

[Algorhythm-sxv]

I'm sure you would have people lining up to donate compute, and the chess programming community have some group servers that may help mitigate the bias from private hosting