MacMahon - The Program
Christoph Gerlach's MacMahon is a pairing program for tournaments using McMahon Pairing or Swiss Pairing.
See http://www.cgerlach.de/go/macmahon.html for further information.
The current version is 2.50 released on 2009-05-13 (as of June 2009).
Christoph Gerlach, the author of MacMahon, has incorporated into the program the results of his thesis (in German) for an exact algorithm for optimizing the pairings.
MacMahon is the pairings program recommended by the European Go Database: We strongly encourage all tournaments organizers who usually adopt this program to download this version, since it contains a change in the export file for rating system (the length of the Club has been changed to four characters), so that it better meets EGD's requirements.
"MacMahon" is also a common misspelling of McMahon.
Christoph Gerlach: (historical note) When I wrote my program back in 1994, the name "MacMahon" was used in European tournaments and the system now referred to as "MacMahon" or "McMahon" was developed under the name "MacMahon" in Europe. The question now is: is it historically correct to call the system "McMahon" because this is the name of the person who invented the original idea or to call it "MacMahon" because this is the name under which the system developed to what it is now: a tournament system with many well defined features (the later is my preference).
TimHunt: I think that is slightly disrespectful to the Mr McMahon (Lee McMahon) who invented the system.
Harry Sigerson?: Tim, I don't agree that it's disrespectful. McMahon's name is linked to the pairing system for all time. Language changes by use and mis-use and if MacMahon is how the system is best known by those that use it, then that's its name. In British phone books there's a note, "MAC" - m', Mc and Mac are to be treated as 'Mac' & the next letter in the name determines position...". It's a Scottish thing here in Glasgow <s>.