I will be simulating season 2020 in real-time as if the games were really being played

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Final Siren

Final Siren

Mr Squiggle
Veteran
Aug 18, 2009
4,229
17,495
AFL Club
Richmond
Since there is no actual football, me and a rag-tag group of football analysts, model-builders, and maths geeks are coming come together to simulate games in real-time as if they were really going ahead. Because this is as close as we can get.

It will look something like this:

Screenshot from 2020-03-25 12-07-19.png

So this Thursday night at 7:25pm Eastern Time, Collingwood will begin to play Richmond on https://squiggle.com.au. The match page will slowly update with scores and a score worm.

This will continue all season long, or until we get real games again. There will be a ladder. If, God help us, we don't have real football by September, there will be finals and a premier.

I believe that Australia needs football. I need football. Or, in the absence of the real thing, a simulated version from computer models. So I have been coding my arse off for three days to make it happen.

More details --> https://squiggle.com.au/virtually-season-2020/

Game links will appear somewhere here starting tomorrow --> https://squiggle.com.au/
 

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This idea reminds me of when I was a kid. I used to have an imaginary country, which had an imaginary Australian Football competition in which the capital cities of each of the imaginary country's provinces played each other in a national competition. This was quite radical thinking in 1968 when I was 11!

Anyway, I would devise a fixture in which each city's footy team played each other's (twice), and then I would run a finals series (Final Four, the old Page McIntyre system, because that was all I knew).

The games themselves would be played on my bed top, and how they would work was that I would roll a dice, and whatever number came up was Team A's goals for the 1st quarter. Then I would roll the dice again and that would be Team A's behinds for the quarter. Rinse and repeat for Team B, and then again for quarters 2 - 4. I would tally up all the goals and behinds for both teams over the 4 quarters, and that would represent the final score for each team.

I would play matches, over the course of several weeks, and have the ladder at the end of each round and work out % and everything. I really got into it, because it was literally a roll of the dice, you could never tell which team was going to win each game or be the eventual Premier. (Although I had a soft spot for one of the imaginary teams, who I supposed was linked to my beloved Collingwood, so if I didn't like what number the dice rolled up, I might occasionally do a subtle do-over :))

Anyway, I'm sure that your simulated matches will be a tad more sophisticated, and I'll be interested to follow it, and see how it works. :)

One question though: how will your simulation work though? Will it be just players from opposing teams assigned to each other, and depending on who has the higher player ranking, that will determine who wins the contest?
 
Capital Magpie said:
This idea reminds me of when I was a kid. I used to have an imaginary country, which had an imaginary Australian Football competition in which the capital cities of each of the imaginary country's provinces played each other in a national competition. This was quite radical thinking in 1968 when I was 11!

Anyway, I would devise a fixture in which each city's footy team played each other's (twice), and then I would run a finals series (Final Four, the old Page McIntyre system, because that was all I knew).

The games themselves would be played on my bed top, and how they would work was that I would roll a dice, and whatever number came up was Team A's goals for the 1st quarter. Then I would roll the dice again and that would be Team A's behinds for the quarter. Rinse and repeat for Team B, and then again for quarters 2 - 4. I would tally up all the goals and behinds for both teams over the 4 quarters, and that would represent the final score for each team.

I would play matches, over the course of several weeks, and have the ladder at the end of each round and work out % and everything. I really got into it, because it was literally a roll of the dice, you could never tell which team was going to win each game or be the eventual Premier. (Although I had a soft spot for one of the imaginary teams, who I supposed was linked to my beloved Collingwood, so if I didn't like what number the dice rolled up, I might occasionally do a subtle do-over :))

Anyway, I'm sure that your simulated matches will be a tad more sophisticated, and I'll be interested to follow it, and see how it works. :)

One question though: how will your simulation work though? Will it be just players from opposing teams assigned to each other, and depending on who has the higher player ranking, that will determine who wins the contest?
Click to expand...
Did you play against your imaginary friend?
 
Cotchins Hair Piece said:
Did you play against your imaginary friend?
Click to expand...
Hey, easy to poke fun but I was a kid, and a bit lonely having only moved away from Melbourne to a new city. Yes, the whole thing was imaginary and something that I dreamed up to while away the hours.

No, I didn't play against my imaginary friend. I was the equivalent of Gill, overseeing an Australian Rules Football comp.

Just thought I'd share, as I was reminded of it by the OP.
 
Capital Magpie said:
One question though: how will your simulation work though? Will it be just players from opposing teams assigned to each other, and depending on who has the higher player ranking, that will determine who wins the contest?
Click to expand...
There are a few different models participating and they work in different ways, depending on what the model author felt was best. Commonly they're based on the Elo rating system, which attempts to figure out the strength of different teams based on past results, and recently there's been a rash of new machine learning-based ones.

If you go to https://squiggle.com.au/ and scroll to the bottom ("Friends of Squiggle"), there are links to the sites of the different models, and they all have at least few articles explaining how their model works!

Only a few are player-aware (i.e. track who's in and out of the team), and none of them are able to produce sims of individual player stats (yet!). So it's a team-centric view.
 
Can I be the first to say:

YOU'VE PROGRAMMED THE UMPIRING DECISIONS ALL WRONG!!! OPEN YOUR BLOODY EYES!!!!
 
Final Siren said:
Since there is no actual football, me and a rag-tag group of football analysts, model-builders, and maths geeks are coming come together to simulate games in real-time as if they were really going ahead. Because this is as close as we can get.

It will look something like this:

View attachment 846359

So this Thursday night at 7:25pm Eastern Time, Collingwood will begin to play Richmond on https://squiggle.com.au. The match page will slowly update with scores and a score worm.

This will continue all season long, or until we get real games again. There will be a ladder. If, God help us, we don't have real football by September, there will be finals and a premier.

I believe that Australia needs football. I need football. Or, in the absence of the real thing, a simulated version from computer models. So I have been coding my arse off for three days to make it happen.

More details --> https://squiggle.com.au/virtually-season-2020/

Game links will appear somewhere here starting tomorrow --> https://squiggle.com.au/
Click to expand...
Cool - The SFA lads are doing the same with the totally random Qooty :)
 

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Capital Magpie said:
Hey, easy to poke fun but I was a kid, and a bit lonely having only moved away from Melbourne to a new city. Yes, the whole thing was imaginary and something that I dreamed up to while away the hours.

No, I didn't play against my imaginary friend. I was the equivalent of Gill, overseeing an Australian Rules Football comp.

Just thought I'd share, as I was reminded of it by the OP.
Click to expand...
I used to do the same thing when I was a kid, would roll 2 dice. Left dice was the goals right the behinds. Obviously ment you couldn't come from more than 35 points down in the last quarter.
 
Topkent said:
I used to do the same thing when I was a kid, would roll 2 dice. Left dice was the goals right the behinds. Obviously ment you couldn't come from more than 35 points down in the last quarter.
Click to expand...

I did the same but subtracted 1 from each die so you could get 0.0
Also, if a 6 is rolled, that die is rolled again and added on until a 6 isn't rolled. This way a team could conceivably come back from any deficit.
 
Last edited:
Capital Magpie said:
This idea reminds me of when I was a kid. I used to have an imaginary country, which had an imaginary Australian Football competition in which the capital cities of each of the imaginary country's provinces played each other in a national competition. This was quite radical thinking in 1968 when I was 11!

Anyway, I would devise a fixture in which each city's footy team played each other's (twice), and then I would run a finals series (Final Four, the old Page McIntyre system, because that was all I knew).

The games themselves would be played on my bed top, and how they would work was that I would roll a dice, and whatever number came up was Team A's goals for the 1st quarter. Then I would roll the dice again and that would be Team A's behinds for the quarter. Rinse and repeat for Team B, and then again for quarters 2 - 4. I would tally up all the goals and behinds for both teams over the 4 quarters, and that would represent the final score for each team.

I would play matches, over the course of several weeks, and have the ladder at the end of each round and work out % and everything. I really got into it, because it was literally a roll of the dice, you could never tell which team was going to win each game or be the eventual Premier. (Although I had a soft spot for one of the imaginary teams, who I supposed was linked to my beloved Collingwood, so if I didn't like what number the dice rolled up, I might occasionally do a subtle do-over :))

Anyway, I'm sure that your simulated matches will be a tad more sophisticated, and I'll be interested to follow it, and see how it works. :)

One question though: how will your simulation work though? Will it be just players from opposing teams assigned to each other, and depending on who has the higher player ranking, that will determine who wins the contest?
Click to expand...

I used to do the same, except with just the VFL competition. After the round was finished I took the footy out and played seven big league highlights of my imaginary games. I lived on court road so I used the opposite drives as goals. One neighbor who was behind the goals was very irate I was kicking into his drive.

The neighbors must have looked in amazement as this skinny weird kid was passing the ball to himself, dodging invisible opponents, and then falling over as being tackled. Even a few shadow boxing and wrestling against myself.

I wrote every season down, starting the season 1975, think I I got to season 1995 in six years.

Admittedly I also ridged som of the results, but always in favor of the five power clubs at the time - Carlton, Collingwood, Hawthorn, North Melbourne and Richmond.
I wanted the competition to be realistic as possible, although in the real world I would love to see Fitzroy, Footscray, Geelong and Melbourne win a Premiership. But in my 20 years competition they never did along with Essendon, South Melbourne and St.Kilda. It was unthinkable at the time.
 
terrybull said:
I used to do the same, except with just the VFL competition. After the round was finished I took the footy out and played seven big league highlights of my imaginary games. I lived on court road so I used the opposite drives as goals. One neighbor who was behind the goals was very irate I was kicking into his drive.

The neighbors must have looked in amazement as this skinny weird kid was passing the ball to himself, dodging invisible opponents, and then falling over as being tackled. Even a few shadow boxing and wrestling against myself.

I wrote every season down, starting the season 1975, think I I got to season 1995 in six years.

Admittedly I also ridged som of the results, but always in favor of the five power clubs at the time - Carlton, Collingwood, Hawthorn, North Melbourne and Richmond.
I wanted the competition to be realistic as possible, although in the real world I would love to see Fitzroy, Footscray, Geelong and Melbourne win a Premiership. But in my 20 years competition they never did along with Essendon, South Melbourne and St.Kilda. It was unthinkable at the time.
Click to expand...
Nice. Very parallel to my imaginary comp, we obviously thought along the same lines. My imaginary comp ("virtual comp" nowadsys) was based on VFL teams too (logically as I lived in Melbourne ), however I gave alternate names to the clubs eg "Corella" = Collingwood; "Thiel" = Carlton.

I also had 2 Divisions, with the VFL alternates forming Division 1 and the VFA teams forming Division 2. Promotion and relegation between the Divisions at the end of each season. That's when it got quite tricky.
 
Capital Magpie said:
Nice. Very parallel to my imaginary comp, we obviously thought along the same lines. My imaginary comp ("virtual comp" nowadsys) was based on VFL teams too (logically as I lived in Melbourne ), however I gave alternate names to the clubs eg "Corella" = Collingwood; "Thiel" = Carlton.

I also had 2 Divisions, with the VFL alternates forming Division 1 and the VFA teams forming Division 2. Promotion and relegation between the Divisions at the end of each season. That's when it got quite tricky.
Click to expand...

I wanted to introduce SANFL and WAFL teams, but couldn’t as I was limited to the 12 teams because of using VFL fixture to do the rounds. I couldn’t successfully do my own.

I also remember now that the five heavy weights got two rolls of the dice. So upsets were rare, but did happen as a role of six means there was a role again.
If no footy this year, then might just need to bring out the dice again ;)
 
terrybull said:
I wanted to introduce SANFL and WAFL teams, but couldn’t as I was limited to the 12 teams because of using VFL fixture to do the rounds. I couldn’t successfully do my own.

I also remember now that the five heavy weights got two rolls of the dice. So upsets were rare, but did happen as a role of six means there was a role again.
If no footy this year, then might just need to bring out the dice again ;)
Click to expand...
That's what I'm starting to think as well. As CEO and el supremo of my little fantasy league, I feel a Collingwood Premiership is on the cards!
 
Capital Magpie said:
That's what I'm starting to think as well. As CEO and el supremo of my little fantasy league, I feel a Collingwood Premiership is on the cards!
Click to expand...

I think I had Collingwood only winning Premierships with the years ending in 0. So total 2 Premierships in 1980 and 1990. So very possible a Magpie Premiership in this end as well...
 
Capital Magpie said:
This idea reminds me of when I was a kid. I used to have an imaginary country, which had an imaginary Australian Football competition in which the capital cities of each of the imaginary country's provinces played each other in a national competition. This was quite radical thinking in 1968 when I was 11!

Anyway, I would devise a fixture in which each city's footy team played each other's (twice), and then I would run a finals series (Final Four, the old Page McIntyre system, because that was all I knew).

The games themselves would be played on my bed top, and how they would work was that I would roll a dice, and whatever number came up was Team A's goals for the 1st quarter. Then I would roll the dice again and that would be Team A's behinds for the quarter. Rinse and repeat for Team B, and then again for quarters 2 - 4. I would tally up all the goals and behinds for both teams over the 4 quarters, and that would represent the final score for each team.

I would play matches, over the course of several weeks, and have the ladder at the end of each round and work out % and everything. I really got into it, because it was literally a roll of the dice, you could never tell which team was going to win each game or be the eventual Premier. (Although I had a soft spot for one of the imaginary teams, who I supposed was linked to my beloved Collingwood, so if I didn't like what number the dice rolled up, I might occasionally do a subtle do-over :))

Anyway, I'm sure that your simulated matches will be a tad more sophisticated, and I'll be interested to follow it, and see how it works. :)

One question though: how will your simulation work though? Will it be just players from opposing teams assigned to each other, and depending on who has the higher player ranking, that will determine who wins the contest?
Click to expand...

Final Siren likes this
 
Final Siren said:
There are a few different models participating and they work in different ways, depending on what the model author felt was best. Commonly they're based on the Elo rating system, which attempts to figure out the strength of different teams based on past results, and recently there's been a rash of new machine learning-based ones.

If you go to https://squiggle.com.au/ and scroll to the bottom ("Friends of Squiggle"), there are links to the sites of the different models, and they all have at least few articles explaining how their model works!

Only a few are player-aware (i.e. track who's in and out of the team), and none of them are able to produce sims of individual player stats (yet!). So it's a team-centric view.
Click to expand...
Does this account for upsets as well?
 
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