Bump

Bump. I know a lot of us have been pretty dispirited about football this week (me included), but don't forget to participate in the final round! The rankings are still pretty fluid at the top, and this Saturday introduces a number of intriguing matches.

Will the pick'em challenge be extended into the postseason for the caa teams that are competing?

(11-22-2013 07:12 PM)Potomac Wrote:  Will the pick'em challenge be extended into the postseason for the caa teams that are competing?

I'm not sure why I didn't think of this. There's no reason why it shouldn't be, really. Thus, the challenge will be extended throughout the playoffs for any CAA teams who are still alive.

I'm also trying to see if I can throw together another playoff bracket challenge website like I did last year for anyone who's interested. I started over that code base from scratch to improve the internal design compared to last year's. I have a lot of it finished already, but we'll see what I can get done this weekend.

Don't forget that there's still 1 game to pick this week for this challenge.

Bump. Two games to pick this week

bump. Don't forget the first game is tonight!

Bump. Don't forget that the unh game is tonight

Bump. Last game of the year!

lyric,
any chance this can be done again this season? The first CAA game is Stony Brook on Thursday.

(08-25-2014 11:28 AM)Potomac Wrote:  lyric,
any chance this can be done again this season? The first CAA game is Stony Brook on Thursday.

Yes! I actually had a few other people ask me about it this weekend, too, so I was up late last night making some edits to the code to get it ready for this season. I need to make a few more small changes before it's ready to go, but I expect everything to be in order by later this evening (I'll post again at that time).

Also, thanks for letting me know that the first CAA game is on Thursday. I actually didn't realize that and thought I had a little more time than I did!

Stay tuned....

Alright, as promised, the website should be live and ready to go. Not promising that a bug won't appear somewhere, but I'll address it if it does. I had been hoping to completely remake the website in a more powerful language/environment and get it hosted on a better server, but life got in the way this year. Maybe I'll upgrade it next year.

Just like last year, the 2014 CAA Pick 'Em Challenge can be found at http://caachallenge.site40.net (like in previous years, the shady-looking domain is the "price" I have to pay for hosting the challenge on a free web server. This one, if you're curious: http://www.000webhost.com/. I've hosted the Playoff and Pick 'Em challenges through their service for the past 3 years now, and generally it's worked out very well). Also, because I'm hosting the challenge for free, the website may occasionally go down for an hour here or there, but in my experience, the outages are infrequent and don't last very long. In other words, because I do not manage my own web server, there's nothing I can do in situations like that. Just try to check back an hour later or so, and things will more than likely be back up and running.

Unlike last year, this year's challenge will only run through the end of the regular season.

All are welcome to play, and the more of you who play, the more fun it is for everyone! Please feel free to invite any of your family or friends who may be interested, too. All you need to do is create an account (only takes 5 seconds - just create a username, password, and tell me who your favorite team is so I can know if we have any of our other CAA friends participating). If you participated last year, all you need to do is log into your old account (or create a new one, if you prefer). I collect no other information through your account whatsoever (aside from your predictions, of course). The only reason you need an account at all is so that others can't tamper with your picks.

The first CAA game is **Thursday**!! Get your picks (or at least that pick) in by Thursday game time. All games may be predicted right up until game time. In other words, after Thursday's game has started, you'll still be able to enter predictions for Friday and Saturday's games.

Final note: One of you created an account and made predictions a little before I was ready for you. I love the enthusiasm, but I went ahead and deleted your picks because I hadn't written an explanation of the scoring system yet (which might have changed what you would have done). Feel free to log back in and select new picks!

[quote='Lyric' pid='11028193' dateline='1409024880']
Alright, as promised, the website should be live and ready to go. Not promising that a bug won't appear somewhere, but I'll address it if it does. I had been hoping to completely remake the website in a more powerful language/environment and get it hosted on a better server, but life got in the way this year. Maybe I'll upgrade it next year.

Just like last year, the 2014 CAA Pick 'Em Challenge can be found at http://caachallenge.site40.net (like in previous years, the shady-looking domain is the "price" I have to pay for hosting the challenge on a free web server. This one, if you're curious: http://www.000webhost.com/. I've hosted the Playoff and Pick 'Em challenges through their service for the past 3 years now, and generally it's worked out very well). Also, because I'm hosting the challenge for free, the website may occasionally go down for an hour here or there, but in my experience, the outages are infrequent and don't last very long. In other words, because I do not manage my own web server, there's nothing I can do in situations like that. Just try to check back an hour later or so, and things will more than likely be back up and running.

Unlike last year, this year's challenge will only run through the end of the regular season.

All are welcome to play, and the more of you who play, the more fun it is for everyone! Please feel free to invite any of your family or friends who may be interested, too. All you need to do is create an account (only takes 5 seconds - just create a username, password, and tell me who your favorite team is so I can know if we have any of our other CAA friends participating). If you participated last year, all you need to do is log into your old account (or create a new one, if you prefer). I collect no other information through your account whatsoever (aside from your predictions, of course). The only reason you need an account at all is so that others can't tamper with your picks.

The first CAA game is **Thursday**!! Get your picks (or at least that pick) in by Thursday game time. All games may be predicted right up until game time. In other words, after Thursday's game has started, you'll still be able to enter predictions for Friday and Saturday's games.

Final note: One of you created an account and made predictions a little before I was ready for you. I love the enthusiasm, but I went ahead and deleted your picks because I hadn't written an explanation of the scoring system yet (which might have changed what you would have done). Feel free to log back in and select new picks!

Sorry for being too anxious ... I just went back to pick once more.

Thanks for all your hard work! :)

(08-26-2014 08:43 AM)FreshDad Wrote:  Sorry for being too anxious ... I just went back to pick once more.

Thanks for all your hard work! :)

A little jumpy are you??? You want be worth a hoot come Saturday. Take a few deep breaths. Breathe in (pause), breathe out, again, breathe in, now breathe out, one more time...

Thanks for doing this Lyric. I wondered if you had thought about pinging georgia_tech_swagger to see if he'd be willing to host this on csnbbs.com?

Failing that, I'd be willing to chip in to get it on a decent host. I think you can get a full LAMP stack + domain off of Bluehost for like $5 a month now. There may even be cheaper options than that.

(08-26-2014 09:47 AM)DooX Wrote:  Thanks for doing this Lyric. I wondered if you had thought about pinging georgia_tech_swagger to see if he'd be willing to host this on csnbbs.com?

Failing that, I'd be willing to chip in to get it on a decent host. I think you can get a full LAMP stack + domain off of Bluehost for like $5 a month now. There may even be cheaper options than that.

I appreciate the offer to chip in! I hadn't considered either of those things, specifically, but I am interested in eventually moving the website to a better hosting service. I'd never heard of Bluehost before, but I was looking it up just now, and that sounds like a really good deal. I also liked the language support they were advertising, too (particularly Ruby/Rails and Python). Do you happen to know offhand if those languages are supported in their ~$5/month package? It wasn't clear, from what I could tell, but I didn't exhaustively research it yet.

Given how close we are to the start of the season and the fact that I'm a bit swamped at work this week (surprise proposal due), I'll probably just stick with the current hosting arrangements for this season, barring a mid-season hosting catastrophe, but I plan to more aggressively explore these better hosting options for the next challenge, particularly if there's strong interest in the Challenge.

That would also give me more time to rewrite the challenge first before finding the appropriate hosting environment for it. If I had had more time this year, my plan was to rewrite the Challenge in Ruby on Rails. As an AI /Data Mining scientist, I had also really hoped to develop an algorithm that can accurately predict the outcome of FCS football games. Turns out the design I came up with closely matches a proof-of-concept design produced by a two people at Stanford 4 years ago that was ~73% accurate predicting 2-year's worth of FBS games (the reported performance would have been competitive for 1st place in last year's CAA Challenge). From a technical standpoint, I have what I need to write what I think would be an even better pipeline in Python, but unfortunately I lack the appropriate data set (I would require weekly team stats from every FCS team across the past few years. The NCAA website has this data, but they explicitly forbid crawlers from being leveraged to obtain it). If anyone knows of any other free sources of FCS football weekly team statistics, please let me know :). The idea was I would enter the AI as a contestant (potentially under a non-descript pseudonym to see if anyone could distinguish it from any other participant). Maybe next year...

(08-26-2014 08:43 AM)FreshDad Wrote:  Sorry for being too anxious ... I just went back to pick once more.

Thanks for all your hard work! :)

No problem! Thank you for participating :)

We're up to 20 people who have submitted their first predictions now! Thanks to all of you who have signed up so far! I appreciate the support, and it's been fun organizing these challenges for you all the past few years!

I'd love to have even more of you! I know I've talked with ~8 others within the past week who had indicated they would like to participate, so the numbers should be going up soon.

(08-26-2014 07:07 PM)Lyric Wrote:  We're up to 20 people who have submitted their first predictions now! Thanks to all of you who have signed up so far! I appreciate the support, and it's been fun organizing these challenges for you all the past few years!

I'd love to have even more of you! I know I've talked with ~8 others within the past week who had indicated they would like to participate, so the numbers should be going up soon.

Did you think about posting an invitation to some other schools here like Towson and Wm and Mary?