Given once, 2025

An Introduction to Tournaments

A first look at tournaments, where every pair plays exactly once and one of them wins

Tournaments · Graph algorithms · Computational social choice

An introductory survey, for graduate students and up.

Abstract

Draft, not yet checked by me

In a round-robin competition every pair of players meets once and one of them wins; recording the results gives a tournament, a complete graph with a direction on every edge. I introduce tournaments as objects of study in their own right and as models of competitions and pairwise comparisons, and look at a question they naturally raise: given the results, who deserves to be called a winner?

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