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Subject: Re: SSDF Corruption

Author: Ratko V Tomic

Date: 12:10:06 09/27/99

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> Overwhelming evidence of fraud and corruption. The probabilities that
> you or anyone had to be conceived and born are almost infinitesimal.
> Therefore, and according to your statistics , you probably don't exist.

Not exactly the same. If you give some general properties, such as
"only programs from CB on top hardware" than it is perfectly legitimate
to compute in how many ways such properties are satisfied compared to all
possible combinations. It is conceptually no different than estimating
the odds of "4 dice giving 6" etc.  While generally it would not have
occured to me to even look at the odds here, there was an ongoing
controversy with SSDF and their pro-CB bias, so much so that they have
a response to the accusations on their web page.

The fact that, just in time for the Christmas shopping season, they hand-picked
4 CB products to be at the top of their chart (by virtue of putting them,
and only them, on top hardware) only adds another bit to the existent picture.
If they had only limited number of fast machines, there are so many other
ways to arrange tests to be even-handed and fair to all other programs,
that no amount of the rationalizations on their web page can explain it.

In addition to this latest pick and the earlier controversy about the
proprietary CB autoplayer, one can also question their allowing their
testers to mostly overlook the problems with killer books, opponent
recognition, and other similar tricks. Since such gimmicks are well known,
there should be in place a set of effective and strict measures to detect
such and disqualify offending programs, or at least disqualify their
results achieved by such means (unrelated to program's chess playing
quality/strength, as would be perceived by an end user).




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