Advance players to next match - Tournament Brackets (Need some Logic)

Question

I'm having trouble thinking of a logical way to advance players to a new match in my tournament brackets. You can see the example here: http://www.stickyflames.com/brackets.php?id=3

Matches go from 1 to the number of players playing. (1-8, in the example). Use this first section of the question to see how my matches are set up: How to determinate round by element in tree (Tournament brackets)?

Here's a scenerio to demonstrate: Example1 wins his match, so he gets thrown into match 5, slot 1. While Example2 wins his, and goes into Match 5, slot 2. On the other hand, Example3 and Example4 gets put into M6 slots.

Do any of you know some mathematical algorithm that can calculate the match where they are supposed to end up? (slots can be determined using modulus so not worried about that)

Thanks a bunch.

Answer 1

EDIT: Here is the answer he was looking for. To calculate the rounds based on matches:

Math.round(match# / 2) + Round-1-match-count

Glad you could solve it yourself :]

Another way of looking at it:

Let's redesign the problem here. Right now it seems like you're adapting this sort of tree

1 
      5       
2
          7
3 
      6  
4   

Something like that and you kind of want an algorithm that will get 1/2 to 5, 3/4 to 6, etc. I bet you could make a formula for this but it might be a little more complicated than necessary. If you think about it, 1/2 never has to enter 6, 3/4 never has to enter 5, etc. In fact I think it'd be a lot easier, and accurate, to look at it like this:

0a 
      2a       
1a
          3a
0b 
      2b  
1b   

Idk how your code is formatted right now but if you wanted to differentiate them, you could do a's and b's .

Now the algorithm to move up is just

if (spot == 0) { 
    spot=spot+2;     //we'll move it to the next because 0 is the only exception
} else {             //if odd  
    spot=spot+1;     //ideally we only need to add one to move to the next bracket
}

You can use parseInt to get the number only. But wait! how will it know which slot to go to because they are the same number? That's why we can use the letters. The cool thing about strings is that they are are just an array of characters stringed together. Example:

var word = "Hello";
word[0] = "H";

So you can access the letter by doing spot[1] and that way you can make sure that a's stick with a's and b's stick with b's. Hope this helps.

Oh and one last thing. You might be wondering what about the 3a? There is no b there. Well I'm not entirely sure if you want a letter there anyways but if you did want it, you could just make your code to see if a b exists. If it doesn't, then put it in a because that's the only spot it can go.