Author: Eelco de Groot
Date: 04:24:34 03/21/00
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On March 21, 2000 at 04:40:40, Tom Kerrigan wrote: >It is not clear to me why Xie Jun did not agree to play via telephone. > >She says it was to avoid the possibility of cheating on DJ's side. > >But clearly someone was making DJ's moves manually over the Internet. How else >could this Kd8 mouse slip have happened? So what was to prevent the person from >cheating? Even if a human wasn't making the moves manually, cheating is >obviously possible. > >I suppose it's possible that Xie Jun does not understand the technology involved >at all, and does not know any better. > >But I think it's more likely that she was just trying to be difficult. > >Other than this detail, her story sounds very compelling. > >-Tom Yes, you would think that using a plain old telephone could at least have solved some of the disconnection problems, don't you think so too? In the fourth game , the Junior team was indeed playing manually but not before, going by the account at Kasparov Chess, excerpt below: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- At 13:31 GMT, Xie Jun played her first move - e4! Like in a horror story, DJ did not respond. The night before, in the midst of the Kasparov grand simul in NY and just before the live Becker-Kasparov match planned for the next day, a correction was made to the DJ robot to patch a problem of not updating Deep Junior with server time when the second time control would take effect. Apparently, this last-minute change was fatal, and locked DJ just at the crucial moment. (Naturally, the new robot had been tested during the night and found to be working.) After several attempts to recover, we decided to move to manual feeding. (This was also the way Xie Jun was playing--that is, over the board, with moves fed via Mr. Leong, the official observer.) Xie Jun demanded compensation: a 20-minute deduction on DJ's clock, which was granted to her upon resuming. As the tragedy continued, DJ's manual operator committed a mouse slip and instead of castling, the book move, he dropped DJ's queen on d8. This out-of-the-blue event did not stop DJ, and the game continued, with DJ working its way out of the odd position it was driven into. But then came the final blow--a disconnection message from Xie Jun's playing applet was received just as she played 16. Qe2. Xie Jun did not realize she had been disconnected from the server. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Xie Jun's account about the reasons for the time deduction and about the disconnection are very different but apart from that, don't you think that there should have been at least an independent observer and better an official arbiter present at both places? This has always been the case in the Rebel Grandmaster Challenge Matches as far as I know. Admittedly that would have been more expensive but surely they could have found an arbiter somewhere in Israel? If both parties had agreed to this beforehand an arbiter or arbiters could have helped see to it that suitable conditions had been met before the match started and help negotiate and arbitrate some of the unforeseen problems that are sure to arise in such experimental matches. I think Xie Jun could have asked for that, and that would have been just a reasonable request in my opinion. Eelco
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