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A quest for a fair schedule: The Young Physicists' Tournament

Author

Listed:
  • Katarína Cechlárová

    (Institute of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, P. J. Safárik University, Kosice, Slovakia)

  • Ágnes Cseh

    (Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Institute of Economics, Tóth Kálmán utca 4., Budapest, 1097, Hungary Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany)

  • Author-Name:Zsuzsanna Jankó

    (Department of Mathematics, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Department of Operations Research and Actuarial Sciences, Corvinus University of Budapest, Budapest, Hungary)

  • Author-Name:Marián Kires

    (Institute of Physics, Faculty of Science, P. J. Safárik University, Kosice, Slovakia)

  • Author-Name:Lukás Mino

    (Center for Information Science and Information Technologies, Technology and Innovation Park, P. J. Safárik University, Kosice, Slovakia)

Abstract

The Young Physicists Tournament is an established team-oriented scientific competition between high school students from 37 countries on 5 continents. The competition consists of scientific discussions called Fights. Three or four teams participate in each Fight, each of whom presents a problem while rotating the roles of Presenter, Opponent, Reviewer, and Observer among them. The rules of a few countries require that each team announce in advance 3 problems they will present at the national tournament. The task of the organizers is to choose the composition of Fights in such a way that each team presents each of its chosen problems exactly once and within a single Fight no problem is presented more than once. Besides formalizing these feasibility conditions, in this paper we formulate several additional fairness conditions for tournament schedules. We show that the fulfillment of some of them can be ensured by constructing suitable edge colorings in bipartite graphs. To find fair schedules, we propose integer linear programs and test them on real as well as randomly generated data.

Suggested Citation

  • Katarína Cechlárová & Ágnes Cseh & Author-Name:Zsuzsanna Jankó & Author-Name:Marián Kires & Author-Name:Lukás Mino, 2020. "A quest for a fair schedule: The Young Physicists' Tournament," KRTK-KTI WORKING PAPERS 2025, Institute of Economics, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies.
    • Handle: RePEc:has:discpr:2025
    as

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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
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    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

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    JEL classification:

    • C63 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods; Programming Models; Mathematical and Simulation Modeling - - - Computational Techniques
    • C78 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Bargaining Theory; Matching Theory

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