Tilt to Live 2 Early Bird Tournament [Winner: sky1988611]

[Kamikaze28]

sky's previously mentioned score has now appeared on Game Center, a whopping 1,733,764,495 - and yes, that's 10 digits ladies and gentlemen. From outside the top 10, Akkete jumps to #2 in Classic Mode with 499,493,874 - just ever so slightly below the half-million mark. Similarly, QuantumApocalypse makes quite a big jump upwards with 264,060,011.
In Code Red, sky *only* increased his lead by doubling his score to 876,460,560, but I'm sure he's working on 10 digits in this discipline as well.

The last hours of the Tournament are fast approaching, time to kick it up a notch.

[Kamikaze28]

China March Helendog played a little bit of catch-up on Classic Mode and came in 2nd behind sky.

And with this final update the Tournament comes to a close. I hope you all enjoyed it and had a good time.

Now on the the "prizes". The undisputed Redonkulous Early Bird with a top score in both disciplines is sky1988611. Apart from his honorary title he will be taking home barrels upon barrels of glory, pride, and honor as well as both extra barrels of admiration for ranking #1 in both disciplines. Well done, sir.
Additional barrels of glory, pride, and honor go out to China March Helendog (Classic Mode #2, Code Red #3), mh8800 (Code Red #2) and Akkete (Classic Mode #3).
Congratulations to you all and see you again in another tournament!

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I would now like to take a moment to summarize my observations both for myself and for you, either as participant or observer.

1. Optimized update routine
   The number of participants finally got me to the point of hacking together a Python script to do all the formatting for me (which I previously did meticulously by hand before). Armed with this script the only manual work I now need to do is go through Game Center and copy/paste new scores into the file the script reads. The nice thing about this lesson is that I can now easily modify the script to work in future tournaments with different scoring mechanisms.
2. Scoring
   As you can read in this thread, the scoring in this tournament was the result of discussion and a sort of experiment to see how things would work out. I would argue that it worked fine for ranking the higher players but it clearly fell short for the rest due to the distribution of scores (which follows a power law). In essence, this problem manifests itself in the simple fact that a higher top score squishes together the many more lower scores in the discipline. This can be somewhat fixed by modifying the formula to result in a linear distribution of points despite the exponential distribution of scores. But I fear further complicating the system leads to more confusion.
3. Submitting and collecting scores
   Game Center didn't throw any temper tantrums this time as far as I could tell and with the newfound control by the devs it should only improve over time. On the other hand, Game Center still requires manual work to update the leaderboards. No alternative comes to mind though.
   

I'm interested in hearing your views so feel free to post.