Some teams who advanced to Final Round pointed that the race courses used in the matches of Final Round do not look to be generated by the course generator specified in the Final Round Rules.

We confirmed that the race courses were generated by course_generator.py. However, the generator generated the courses without including the course pieces defined in blocks/ and logos/.

We will not replay Final Round or adjust its results because we recognize that such race courses formally do not violate Final Round Rules. We ask for your understanding.

Nevertheless, though "generated by the randomized course generator" does not explicitly indicate that the generator should include the course pieces, it is natural to understand that the generator should inlcude them considering the race courses used in Preliminary Round and the fact that "the randomized course generator" in the rule document is not linked to course_generator.py but the directory containing it. In fact, many AI were optmized for the generator that includes the course pieces. We apologize for contestants who advanced to Final Round that such optimizations did not make any sense.

We also note that we did not intend to generate the courses without including the pieces but the pieces were not included just due to our mistakes. The script course_generator.py includes files in the directories blocks/ and logos/ as course pieces if these directories exist in a working direcotry. When we executed this script to generate courses for Final Round, however, the script was executed in another directory. In addition, we could not notice this fact when checking the match results.

To prevent recurrence of such incidents in future contests, we will take a longer span between a submission deadline and result announcement to check match results more carefully, offer environments based on Qualifying and Final Round rules before submission deadlines (such an environment depends on what game is conducted in each contest; as for the game of this year, we could show some examples of race courses generated using the settings specified in the Qualifying and Final Round rules). In addition, it might be difficult for fairness and workload, we will consider requesting contestants to check their submitted programs when they look clearly wrong.

There is another kind of comments from some contestants that they misunderstood that the limitation of the length of race courses in Final Round is same to Qualifying Round, because the Final Round page says "(the Game Rules are the same as in the Qualifying Round)". Actually, the lengh is between 100 and 200 in Final Round while between 50 to 100 in Qualifying Round. We think that we explicitly showed that the limitaiton in Final Round is diefferent from Qualifying Round even considering the parenthesized statement, because "Game Rules", "Qualifying Round Rules", and "Final Round Rules" are separate documents and the limitations are specified in the latter two docuements. Nevertheless, we will improve the clarity of rule documens in future contests.

Again, we apologize that our mistakes brought the disappointing results for some teams and ask for your kind understanding in our decision.

SamurAI Coding 2018-19 Committee