So the Qualifying Round is in place to ensure that (1) we have a number of participants in Round 1 that allows us to maintain an even number in every subsequent round, and (2) to help us match up the authors for the voting in Round 2.
For the first bit, that means we needed to shave down our participants from whatever number we received to either 8, or 16 participants, because the way the brackets function, where half the authors are chopped each round, those numbers would allow us to have 8, then 4, then 2, or 16, then 8, then 4, then 2. If we were to get, say 20, we’d have 20, then 10, and then 5, which would cause problems for our “head-to-head” structure for voting! So with 20 participants, only four would be Chopped at the end of the Qualifying Round.
For the second bit, instead of randomly ordering the authors into our brackets, we will use the results from the Qualifying Round to put the authors in order for Round 1. We thought this seemed like a fairer way of ordering than simply us choosing randomly!