People's Champion Tournament: Nominations Closed!

otistdog · January 7, 2025, 6:39pm

We are still at 93 unique candidate games, with some duplicates granting extra tickets to certain games (see above). At the moment, about 2/3 of the candidate games will be selected for the tournament.

Five people registered as PCT Fans have not yet sent in any picks, new players can sign up at any time (see the FAQ for details), and there are still four days left before the nomination deadline.

Welcome to new PCT Fan Morningstar, who has signed up since yesterday. We’re now at 26 registered fans!

Morningstar · January 8, 2025, 6:45am

Augmented Fourth - Brian Uri
Risorgimento Represso - Michael J. Coyne
Christminster - Gareth Rees
Winter Wonderland - Laura Knauth
Crystal and Stone, Beetle and Bone - Jenny Brennan

otistdog · January 8, 2025, 6:06pm

As of right now, including nominations via PM, there are a total of 94 unique candidate games that have been nominated. With the current set of candidates, about 2/3 of the nominated games will be selected for the tournament.

Eleven candidates have been independently nominated more than once and will get extra tickets in the lottery drawing. These are:

Never Gives Up Her Dead (3)
Christminster (3)
Winter Wonderland (1999) (3)
Delightful Wallpaper (2)
A Dark Room (2)
Bogeyman (2)
All Things Devours (2)
For a Change (2)
Aisle (2)
Augmented Forth (2)
Risorgimento Represso (2)

Four people registered as PCT Fans have not yet sent in any picks, and new players can sign up at any time (see the FAQ for details). There are just three days left before the nomination deadline, so be sure to send in your choices or post them on this thread before time runs out!

otistdog · January 9, 2025, 5:14pm

As of right now, including nominations via PM, there are a total of 98 unique candidate games that have been nominated. With the current set of candidates, about 2/3 of the nominated games will be selected for the tournament.

Twelve candidates have been independently nominated more than once and will get extra tickets in the lottery drawing. These are:

Never Gives Up Her Dead (3)
Christminster (3)
Winter Wonderland (1999) (3)
Delightful Wallpaper (2)
A Dark Room (2)
Bogeyman (2)
All Things Devours (2)
For a Change (2)
Aisle (2)
Augmented Forth (2)
Risorgimento Represso (2)
Eidolon (2)

Three people registered as PCT Fans have not yet sent in any picks, and new players can sign up at any time (see the FAQ for details). There are just two days left before the nomination deadline, so be sure to send in your choices or post them on this thread before time runs out!

FAQ Update:

In the event that any game is withdrawn by the author at some point after the lottery drawing, a replacement will be chosen at random from games that were not selected.

rovarsson · January 9, 2025, 9:11pm

I’m really happy with the love for Winter Wonderland ! Very cool. I’ll have to replay it to refresh my memory, but I remember I was impressed with how the humble prologue opened up into a big and varied game.

otistdog · January 10, 2025, 6:36pm

As of right now, including nominations via PM, there are a total of 99 unique candidate games that have been nominated. With the current set of candidates, about 2/3 of the nominated games will be selected for the tournament.

Twelve candidates have been independently nominated more than once and will get extra tickets in the lottery drawing. These are:

Never Gives Up Her Dead (3)
Christminster (3)
Winter Wonderland (1999) (3)
Delightful Wallpaper (2)
A Dark Room (2)
Bogeyman (2)
All Things Devours (2)
For a Change (2)
Aisle (2)
Augmented Forth (2)
Risorgimento Represso (2)
Eidolon (2)

Three people registered as PCT Fans have not yet sent in any picks, and new players can sign up at any time (see the FAQ for details).

The nomination deadline is about 36 hours away, so be sure to send in your choices or post them on this thread before time runs out!

dfranke · January 10, 2025, 9:52pm

Since a third vote for a game only stands a 3.6% [EDIT: actually 10.0% with the new entries plus fixing a bug in my script] chance of making a difference, I’m going to withdraw my nomination of Christminster (leaving it with two others) and substitute Inevitable (2003).

Joey · January 10, 2025, 11:32pm

My nominations:

Six
Scents and Semiosis
Hana Feels
Alabaster
Everybody Dies

otistdog · January 11, 2025, 4:04pm

The nomination deadline is just 8 hours away. It’s not too late to send in your choices or post them on this thread before time runs out, but it will be soon! Once the deadline has passed, no new nominations will be accepted.

As of right now, including nominations via PM, there are a total of 104 unique candidate games that have been nominated. With the current set of entries, about 3/5 of the nominated games will be selected for the tournament.

Thirteen candidates have been independently nominated more than once and will get extra tickets in the lottery drawing. (See list above.)
If you have registered as a fan but not sent in any picks, now is the time to get them in. Also, new players can still sign up (see the FAQ for details).

I made a little simulator for the drawing. Lady Luck can be pretty brutal to any particular person’s list of choices, but in a handful of test runs there was always at least one of each person’s picks in the final list. I estimate that for any particular person in the worst case scenario there is only a 1% chance that none of their picks will be drawn.

Drawing Simulator.gblorb (679.4 KB)

I don’t know how to calculate the odds exactly, but it seems like there’s about a 90% chance for any game with three nominations to be selected, about 75% for a game with two nominations, and about 60% for a game with only one nomination.

dfranke · January 11, 2025, 4:26pm

EDIT: auuugh, my script had a bug which gave an extra ticket to everything that already had 2+. Edited with corrected probabilities.

I’m not enough of a combinatorics nerd to bother working this out in closed form so I just wrote a Monte Carlo sim. I’m finding that the games with three nominations have a 92.8% chance of selection, games with two nominations have a 82.9% chance, and games with one nomination have a 58.4% chance. If you’re the sole nominator of each of five games, the probability that none of them will be selected is about 1.0%.

simpsong00 · January 11, 2025, 5:38pm

I LOVE that there is an IF simulation of drawing the tickets… haha… and I’m happy to say that in my use of this simulated world, my game came in at pick number 63, just making the tournament in this part of the multi-verse.

BadParser · January 11, 2025, 7:49pm

For your consideration:

Babel - Ian Finley
First Things First - J. Robinson Wheeler
Mirror and Queen - Chandler Groover
Nightfall - Eric Eve
Once and Future - G. Kevin Wilson

dfranke · January 11, 2025, 8:27pm

I improved my script from doing a Monte Carlo sim to actually tracing the Markov chain and computing exact probabilities. After updating on BadParser’s picks (two of which I believe are second nominations and the other three are first), I get:

freq=1: 92669122555681399914731313260927341/168150294032666660103877444648553400 ~= 0.5511088939141463
freq=2: 2652221291374214297692356226203683/3322118271162107266489979909469900 ~= 0.7983524591514447
freq=3: 10222122579030564926463355216721/11250521479503991710415993887900 ~= 0.9085910015507329

To update on any further last-minute nominations you can edit the “INITIAL_POOL” line near the top of this Python script and rerun it.

import fractions

N_PICKS = 64
INITIAL_POOL = { 3: 2, 2: 13, 1: 94 }

def next_states(current_state, my_frequency):
  denom = sum([k*v for (k,v) in current_state.items()])
  yield (fractions.Fraction(my_frequency, denom), None)
  for (k, v) in current_state.items():
    new_state = dict(current_state)
    new_state[k] = v - 1
    if new_state[k] == 0:
      del new_state[k]
    if k == my_frequency:
      if v == 1:
        continue
      else:
        probability = fractions.Fraction(k*(v-1), denom)
    else:
      probability = fractions.Fraction(k*v, denom)
    yield (probability, new_state)

def to_cache_entry(state):
  biggest = max(state.keys())
  return tuple([state.get(k, 0) for k in range(biggest+1) ])

def _selection_probability(cache, current_state, picks_remaining, my_frequency):
  if picks_remaining == 0:
    return fractions.Fraction()
  cache_entry = to_cache_entry(current_state)
  if cache_entry in cache:
    return cache[cache_entry]
  total_probability = fractions.Fraction()
  for (probability, new_state) in next_states(current_state, my_frequency):
    if new_state is None:
      total_probability += probability
    else:
      total_probability += probability * _selection_probability(cache, new_state, picks_remaining - 1, my_frequency)
  cache[cache_entry] = total_probability
  return total_probability

def selection_probability(my_frequency):
  cache = dict()
  return _selection_probability(cache, INITIAL_POOL, N_PICKS, my_frequency)

def main():
  frequencies = list(INITIAL_POOL.keys())
  frequencies.sort()

  for freq in frequencies:
    prob = selection_probability(freq)
    exact = str(prob)
    approx = float(prob)
    print(f'freq={freq}: {exact} ~= {approx}')

if __name__ == "__main__":
  main()

otistdog · January 12, 2025, 12:01am

Welcome, new PCT Fan BadParser – that makes 28 registered fans!

Nominations are now closed. Thanks to everyone who sent in their picks – we got more than expected! At the nomination deadline, a total of 124 nominations for 105 unique candidate games have been received. With the current set of entries, about 3/5 of the nominated games will be selected for the tournament.

Seventeen candidates have been independently nominated more than once and will get extra tickets in the lottery drawing. These are:

Never Gives Up Her Dead (3)
Winter Wonderland (1999) (3)
Delightful Wallpaper (2)
A Dark Room (2)
Bogeyman (2)
All Things Devours (2)
For a Change (2)
Aisle (2)
Augmented Forth (2)
Risorgimento Represso (2)
Christminster (2)
Eidolon (2)
Six (2)
Babel (2)
First Things First (2)
Nightfall (2)
Once and Future (2)

It will take a few hours to process last-minute changes and hold the lottery drawing. See the main thread for updates, and get ready to start exploring new games during the tournament’s 8-week “quiet play” period, which begins as soon as drawing results are announced.

dfranke · January 12, 2025, 12:04am

Final selection probabilities:

56.782% for games nominated once;
81.301% for games nominated twice;
91.825% for games nominated three times.

freq=1: 38324604531672947248871546211472621/67493966159906066519213277818644200 ~= 0.567822676783798
freq=2: 64018616464332949329732766526058221/78742960519890410939082157455084900 ~= 0.8130074871665753
freq=3: 7353092935062854708701076348645993/8007758696938007892110049910686600 ~= 0.91824606776357

dfranke · January 12, 2025, 2:13am

Hooray! The random number gods have smiled upon this offering and granted me all but one of my picks!