Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: WCCC 1999 Pairings

Author: Dave Gomboc

Date: 13:13:28 06/08/99

Go up one level in this thread


On June 08, 1999 at 14:45:29, Jeremiah Penery wrote:

>On June 08, 1999 at 13:51:13, Dave Gomboc wrote:
>
>>On June 08, 1999 at 12:44:04, José de Jesús García Ruvalcaba wrote:
>
>>>What I most dislike is that nobody knows which are the strongest entries, so I
>>>do not see how the accelerated pairings will help to match them more >>frequently.
>>>I think one of the premises for accelerated pairings to work is to have a good
>>>ranking of the players, like an established ratings list. But I remember
>>>somebody said that in these tournaments the entries are ranked according to >>the TD's guesses. I do not think that is a good ranking.
>>>José.
>>
>>There's plenty of background material to rank the players on, including the
>>result of previous tournaments and, for some entrants, the SSDF list.  It's not
>>as good as it would be in a human tournament, but it is acceptable.
>
><snip>
>
>>Upsets happen, but since a reasonable ranking can be made before the event, it
>>is okay to use accelerated pairings.
>>
>>Dave
>
>I don't really agree that 'reasonable rankings' can be determined before the
>event in this case.  Any previous performances were from older, presumably
>weaker, versions of these programs, running on slower hardware(?), against
>other, older, weaker programs on slower hardware.  Not to mention that some of
>these have NOT performed before. (Please correct if I'm wrong. :)
>How will the TD choose the 'strongest' programs?  Will he guess?  Pick the
>programs he 'likes' best?  I see no clear way to choose.
>
>Jeremiah

Commercial developers are generally good, amateur programs are generally not as
good.  Amateur programs with success in previous WCCC or WMCCC tournaments are
better than those that haven't.  Parallel versions of software running on
multiple cpus can be expected to perform better than serial versions of the same
software and serial software of similar strength.  SSDF order might be used to
sort serial versions of commercial programs.

The goal is not to rank them perfectly.  If that were possible, we might not
even hold the tournament.  The goal is to come up with a reasonable ranking for
initial pairing decisions, and this is easily done.  If 3 programs out of 30 are
wildly misplaced, it isn't a big deal: the swiss system will take corrective
action, as always.  At the end of the tournament, no one will be able to claim
that the winner played a bunch of weakoes.

Dave



This page took 0.01 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.