Sunday, 14 November 2010

co.combinatorics - Round-Robin Tournaments and Forests

In a round-robin tournament with n teams, each team plays every other team exactly once. Thus, there are n(n1)/2 total games played. How many different standings can result? By a "standing" I mean the ordered sequence (W1,ldots,Wn) where Wi is the number of wins by the ith player. Assume that no game ends in a tie.



I wrote a program to calculate this sequence. For n up to 13, it agrees with the number of forests on n labeled nodes, which is Sequence A001858 in the OEIS. But I can't see the correspondence between tournament standings and forests with labeled nodes. Can anyone explain this?

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