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JaVaFo, a pairing engine for the FIDE (Dutch) System JaVaFo is
the name of a program that implements the pairing rules of the Swiss System
called “FIDE (Dutch) System”, described in the FIDE handbook, chapter C.04.3
(see). The author
JaVaFo is authored and intellectually owned by
Roberto Ricca, former programmer, International Arbiter and current Secretary
of the FIDE Commission “Systems of Pairings and Programs” (SPPC), formerly
known as “Swiss Pairings Programs”. The name
The name JaVaFo
(pronounced yäväfö') comes from
concatenating the first and the last letter of the author's three nephews, The FIDE Dutch Algorithm
The Dutch
System has been brought to FIDE by the Dutch International Arbiter Geurt Gijssen in the early Nineties,
and it has quickly become the main pairing system supported by FIDE. The most
important activity of the FIDE Commission dedicated to the definition of
pairing systems (the aforementioned SPPC) has been the continuous tweaking of
the system wording or of its behaviour, in order to reach a more broad
comprehensibility. Since 2016, the system is being called FIDE (Dutch) System and has a section
of the handbook (C.04.3) exclusively dedicated to it, while the other
FIDE-supported systems are presented altogether in sub-sections of the
ensuing section (C.04.4). A bit of history
In its original presentation, the wording of the
Dutch System was more similar to a software algorithm than a classical set of
rules. There was a good reason behind that. In fact, the legend says that
first came the Swiss Master program that was implementing the Dutch System,
then the rules to be published by FIDE were modelled on the behaviour of such
program. This dichotomy in the Dutch rules was, for quite a
long time, the main source of confusion for both arbiters and programmers:
should they follow (implement) the rules described in the handbook or behave
as Swiss Master was behaving (i.e. "build a clone" in programmers'
lingo)? On top of that, at least until 2011, the FIDE
handbook (at that time, section C.04.1,
called “Swiss System Based On Rating”) was not very helpful, as some of its
rules, perhaps because of how they were born, were ambiguous when not
inconsistent. The end-result of this was that there were some situations
(rather extreme situations, indeed) in which different officially FIDE
endorsed programs produced different pairings, even in top brackets. And all
of them could be right! From 2011 to 2013, at the FIDE Congresses in Krakow,
The work of the SPPC was not finished yet, and the
final push came in 2015 and 2016, at the FIDE Congresses in The pairing engine
Helped by the role that its author has in the SPPC,
JaVaFo has often been the first pairing engine available complying with any
rule adjustment made by the SPPC. Although, after bbpPairings (see) was released in August
2016, JaVaFo cannot be considered any more the best product on the
market, it is still a decent benchmark against which to test other pairing
engines. Or even use it tout-court. As confirmed by the list of FIDE Endorsed Programs (Section C.04, Appendix A, A.10 - Annex 3),
JaVaFo is the pairing engine of a few such programs, after the respective
authors used the notes shown here, similar to the following ones, to
integrate JaVaFo in their tournament-manager. An Advanced User Manual (JaVaFo-AUM) is available in
various formats: ·
pdf file (note: in-lined hyper-links may
or may not
work, depending on browser
or personal settings) The current version of JaVaFo is 2.2 (made available
for the first time on September 15th, 2018 - although programs relying on
JaVaFo have started using it since November 2017). Instructions
JaVaFo is written in Java (there are no relationships between the names Java and JaVaFo - it is
just a coincidence). As said in the manual, JaVaFo can be used either as
a stand-alone program by everyone or, with some manouvering, as a standard
java-archive by a Java developer. In order to use JaVaFo as stand-alone program, a computer
needs a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to run it. Very likely, it already has it.
To find it out, go to the Control Panel and look for a "Java" icon
among all Control Panel items. If there is such icon, Java is already
installed, and just its version may need a check: double-click on the Java
icon or on the corresponding link, select tab General, then press button
About: a pop-up window will report the current version. JaVaFo has been
prepared using Java version-7, so any version of Java equal to 7 or greater,
ensures a proper working of JaVaFo. If there's no "Java" icon up there, just
go to the official java site (www.java.com),
follow the instructions to download the latest release of Java for the
computer operating system, then install it using an 'Administrator' account -
this is a very simple and straightforward operation, which will require just
a few minutes. Once all of this has been done, a computer is ready
to run JaVaFo. Conclusion
As long as it is pronounced properly (again, it is yäväfö') and spelled
correctly (again: javafo, JaVaFo and
JAVAFO are ok, Although thousands of positive tests have been
performed against bbpPairings (at least for the stand-alone program), some
unexpected behaviour may always surface. Please report any problems to javafo@rrweb.org. |