WCS Predictor 2014 - Page 4

On November 28 2013 13:45 lichter wrote:
Die4Ever doesn't get an img thingy coz he didn't want to give me his skype. bastard

WCS was pretty hard to follow, with all those WCS points to look at. Fortunately, we had Die4Ever's WCS Predictor. Without it, we would have had a much harder time following the tournament, and a harder time in wondering if our favorite players could make it to Blizzcon. I investigated whether or not this was the work of a wizard, and if he is secretly evil (he's probably not guys).

lichter: Hi! How does it feel to make it all the way to the Round of 8? As one of the lower seeds it must be pretty exhilarating.

Die4Ever: Haha yea, it's pretty amazing to be on the top 8, I will need to continue working on the WCS Predictor for my fans. I still have some secret plans for it.

You've received a lot of fanfare because of WCS Predictor. Wanna tell the fans your backstory making it? Is it just a hobby or related to your work?

Well I am a professional programmer, I never get to program fun things at work though lol. The old Blizzcon Predictor started as an idea to make automated previews for tournaments, and I was really excited for Blizzcon since I was going to be there for the first time(which was awesome btw).

The new one is a website that will be much better, easier to work on for me, and will have more features. For example in the old one I never fully simulated Code A or Challenger Leagues, since they would've been a pain to program. In WCS Predictor 2014 I'm already simulating Code A and Challenger Leagues, and even the qualifiers with the appropriate region locking.

I'm also planning on having some fun extras since the program already is going to have all the current results for matches and other info. I'm thinking achievements for players like win streaks, upcoming match highlights on the front page and how they will affect players' chances, maybe some other things.

I also have this 1 idea, I guess I'll leak it here.

If you've ever seen Afro Samurai, I want to copy the headbands idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro_samurai#Plot
It's kind of an extension of the Unofficial World Champion thing.
The number 1 headband currently belongs to sOs for winning Blizzcon, the number 2 headband belongs to Jaedong for getting 2nd. If the #2 beats the #1 then they switch headbands. If someone without a headband beats the #2 then they take it. The #1 can only lose their headband to someone with the #2.
This will be tracked for any tournament that gives WCS points.


That sounds pretty awesome. Have you ever tried contacting Blizzard about your predictor? I'm sure they'd be interested in seeing something like that!

I've tweeted it to @Blizzcon and @Starcraft before but no response lol not even a retweet.

That is mega balls. I guess Blizz doesn't like it when someone shows them up. You work with numbers a lot. Any interesting revelations, patterns, or statistics that you've stumbled upon in your work?

Koreans own white dudes.

Also a single season of Code S has I think about 137 billion ways it can play out, so doing millions of simulations is really important for accuracy. Not all of the 137 billion outcomes are significant, like a player making 24th place instead of 32nd place doesn't mean much. The great thing about monte carlo style simulations is that it doesn't need to see every outcome to get pretty accurate probabilities.

In a single season getting 8th place doesn't really do much for a player either, but with the new version doing the overall year, an 8th place will be huge for that player with them being safe in Code S for the next season.

I knew that everyone wanted the new simulations to be up immediately after a match and be accurate lol. So the new version is built to do incremental simulations. It does blocks of 1 million samples/simulations (that number is adjustable) and when you refresh the page (if I'm running it) you can actually see the number of samples going up. The first block is the one where it looks for all the events that help/hurt the players and the other blocks are just for counting and refining the accuracy, so the first block takes the longest.This means I can have a new update on the page after a match in less than 10 minutes, and then after an hour you'll see like 20 million samples for really high accuracy.

You're lucky that we're all nerds on TL; this would go unnoticed in other communities I'm sure. What made you decide to go through all this work for the SC2 Community?

Well I enjoy programming, I mostly did it for fun. I did feel a sense of duty to do the updates after each big match though. Also some of the features were purely for the fans, like the foreigner hope rating and the upcoming match effects. For the new version I plan on it being able to automatically get the new results from liquipedia and start a new update, just in case I'm away or sleeping. It's really great to see all the fans I have gotten though, they're the reason why I'm making the new one so much more polished, I never find fun in polishing programs or making websites look good, all the fun for me is in the problem solving of programming and optimization.

It sounds to me like you're a wizard. Wizards scare me. Have you ever used your powers for evil? With great power comes great responsibility. A dead guy once said this.

Hmm once me and a friend wrote a program back in high school that when run on just 1 computer would print to all the printers in the school. It was like 200 printers or so.

I also once wrote a program as a prank for someone at work, it faked typos by detecting what keys you're pressing and if you were typing fast enough then it would type a letter near the key you pressed, and it would also adjust the mouse speed if you were moving the mouse fast enough, and sometimes swap the mouse buttons. It even had a remote control so I could adjust how hard it would mess with him.

That sounds deliciously evil. Kinda makes your name, Die4Ever, make more sense. Are you dying for someone named Ever, dying forever, are you giving Ever a die, or is it something far more sinister than that?

I came up with the name when I was like 12 lol, the idea is that in video games you respawn, Die4Ever is being said to my opponent, as a command. Kinda like "gg no re" I guess lol.

That's... not a very good name. Anyway. Do you think you have what it takes to make it to the Semi Finals? You will be facing Hot_Bid, who many consider the de facto most awesome bro on TL.

Thanks.
Hot_bid is gonna need a new pair of ESPORTS aviators to beat me.

Well it's going to be a tough battle, but you've made it this far so it should be close. Any last words to your fans?

I wanna thank my fans and the Aligulac guys for their continued support. Vote for me and TheBB in the next round! I also want to take this time to do my best Tasteless impression and plug some of my stuff.
Check out http://sc2.4ever.tv for the WCS Predictor 2014.
Also check out http://4ever.tv 4EverTV is like Pandora for videos and music, and you can watch together and chat and share and stuff, I guess it's not that much like Pandora, just go try it.

Feel free to PM me or tweet me @Die4EverDM with feedback for either site.