About This Site
After talking with a bunch of the curlers in the bonspiel and getting questions about this site, I thought I'd put a blurb here. The site was created 'from scratch' using the PHP scripting language and some homebrewed tools to parse the 'Book' form of the draw's Excel spreadsheet and extract the game data from it. From there it gets the start game and traverses the data to find out what games are reachable and how many ways they can be reached. Some care goes into the arrangement of the games in the graph to avoid having too many crossed lines and to make the tree easier to read overall. I really should have paid more attention in graph theory class...Once the tree data is generated, another PHP script creates an image, draws the transitions between the games, and draws the game boxes and fills them with the game details. This also generates a client-side image map that sets up the hyperlinks that make the tree clickable.
Anyway, as with most of my side projects (like the whole rosterity.com website), this started out as something I made for myself and decided to release to an unsuspecting public. It's good to see that the tool is in such widespread use - I hope to keep it going and make it available for quite a few bonspiels to come as well.
'DrawTree' written and maintained by Chris Butler - ccbutler at gmail dot com