
24 DISCRETE MATHEMATIC..._
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elimination, that is, everyone plays everyone exactly once and we assume no ties. We can represent the results
nicely by arrows, for instance:
A beats B, C, D
B beats D
C beats B
D beats C
(This structure is called a
"digraph".)
Now, the gaming company wants to use this information to make some decisions, like award a first
prize and rank everyone. It wants to do this in such a way that its customers do not complain about the
rankings being unfair. There are some problems in doing this.
Cycles
The first problem is that the tournament graph can contain cycles.
For
example: above, B beats ...