Final arrangements for Power TAC finals

[John Collins]

Dear colleagues -

First of all, thank you to every team who participated in the qualifying round. Of the ten agents entered, two are definitely disqualified:

• EWIIS3_2021 is disqualified because it performed poorly, but more importantly because is was one of two entered by the same team, the other being IS3, which did much better. My understanding is that IS3 was an experimental offshoot of EWIIS3. 
• CIRE_Bro_2021 is disqualified because it is just not ready. I've had extensive conversations with the team; they started late and have not made enough progress.

All the remaining agents in the qualifying round, COLDPOWER2021, CrocodileAgent2020, IS3, Mertacor2021, SPOT, TUC_TAC, UTA_PTA2021, and VidyutVanika will be registered for the finals. However, all of these other than IS3 had multiple unexplained disconnects during the qualifying round, and we have been unable to identify a clear pattern from our end. We don't know whether there were network outages or agents crashing. Also, SPOT disconnected in every game. I've been talking with Porag, and we have identified the cause of the crash they were experiencing.

In addition, we feel that the actual start time of the final round has not been clearly communicated. It's not on powertac.org, it's not on the front page of the tournament scheduler, and if we have sent out an email with this info I cannot find it.

For all these reasons, we have decided to run a one-day trial tomorrow, Monday 11 October, starting at 9:00 UTC. This will give us a chance to iron out any final connection problems, and I will be available most of the day (my day, my clock is set to UTC-5) to answer questions and offer assistance.

The final round will then begin on Tuesday 12 October at 9:00 UTC. If your broker is running by tomorrow morning, it should automatically run in both the Monday trial and in the final round starting Tuesday.

We apologize for any confusion. Please respond if you need assistance or further information. We hope to see vigorous competition and interesting results from the 2021 finals.

John, Wolf, Govert, and Erik

[Govert Buijs]

I've registered the following brokers for the trial:

SPOT               

CrocodileAgent2020 

VidyutVanika       

TUC_TAC            

Mertacor2021       

COLDPOWER2021      

UTA_PTA2021        

IS3                

For the trial and the finals we will use the same tourneyName: finals_2021

If your broker is running fine, you don't need to change anything for the finals.

The page for both can be found here:

http://ts.powertac.org:8080/TournamentScheduler/faces/tournament.xhtml?tournamentId=5

If you have the resources available, it's advised to run 3 agents.

Might one of you agents crash, you will miss any games.

[John Collins]

Dear colleagues -

Due to time pressure and missed communication, one of the qualified agents, UTA_PTA2021, was not configured into the final round. Therefore, the final round will be re-started at 9:00 UTC on Wednesday morning 13 October. We apologize for the confusion.

We suspect the underlying problem was the demise of Nabble combined with assumptions that folks who were subscribed to our Nabble feed would be getting messages through this new forum. Unfortunately, when Nabble went away we lost the subscriber list and had to start over. So if you know anyone who should be getting these messages and is not, please have them send a request.

I sincerely hope this is the last time we need to re-start a competition.

John