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Subject: Re: WCCC 1999 Pairings

Author: José de Jesús García Ruvalcaba

Date: 13:53:48 06/08/99

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On June 08, 1999 at 16:13:28, Dave Gomboc wrote:

>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.

	I would not say that Cray Blitz was not «good».

> Amateur programs with success in previous WCCC or WMCCC tournaments are
>better than those that haven't.

	And new programs? They can be very strong.

> 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.

	But you can not compare two parallel versions based on the respective results
of the serial ones.

> SSDF order might be used to
>sort serial versions of commercial programs.
>

	This one is true. But I think it is a minority of entries.

>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

	The goal of the accelerated pairings in this case is to produce more games
among the top entries, if I understood well. I think that a ranking based on
guesses will have too many wildly misplaced entries, enough to prevent the
accelerated pairings to reach the goal.
José.



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