Author: Harald Faber
Date: 01:06:56 04/07/00
Go up one level in this thread
On April 06, 2000 at 11:22:35, Jeroen Noomen wrote: >Hi everybody, > >There have been a lot of reactions to my last posting, in which I told about >Fritz SSS* taking part in the Dutch championship. Unfortunately most of the >debate was related to 'should computers be allowed to play in human >tournaments'. This is of course an interesting subject, but for me the big point >is that we are talking about the national championship of my country Holland. > >That a computer can take part in such an event raises the following questions: > >1. Has a computer a nationality? First let me say what others already mentioned: Better use the word PROGRAM instead of computer. The computer can do nothing without the program. So, to answer your question, a computer has NO Nationality but the programmer of the chess program has. >2. Can a computer be a national champion? Computer no, program: why not? >3. Players in a national championship are members of the national federation. > Can a computer be a member of a national federation? Why not? You only have to care that program+hardware+operator+settings is one team in this regard. Otherwise you might have 50x the same program but on different hardware etc. Therefore the programmer himself or a guy named by the programmer should operate that constellation. >4. Can the same computer take part in several national championships? > F.e. if the French, the German and the Brittish Chess Federations agree > that the same computer can play in their national championship, could we > have one and the same player be a champion of many countries? If you take the programmers nationality this scenario is not possible. >5. What about the rules, that state that if there is a free place in the > championship, this should be given to somebody with the highest rating or > to somebody who was knocked out in the semi finals. This has been violated > now and this player has every reason to complain. This is indeed a strange behaviour. If the 10 best players are invited but one or more of them cannot participate, it should be the next ranked players who should be invited, starting from rank #11 and so on. Wildcard in national Ch is rubbish IMO. >6. What if the machine will be the champion: Can (in this case Holland) this > country put the machine on board 1 of the Olympiad team? I would go for it. :-) But I fear FIDE has s.th. against it...and what if many other countries do the same? >7. I am interested in who is the strongest player of my country. A computer > program has nothing to do with this. It is the quesiton if you seperate comp from human. Overall it is certainly possible that a program becomes national champion and defeats the other human players. If you want to know the strongest national human player, well, you have to exclude the program(s) of course. >8. A national championship is a serious event, now that Van der Sterren > refuses to play, his loss by forfeit is affecting the result. What f.e. > if Van der Sterren scores the most points, but will be 2nd because of the > loss by means of forfeit? Isn't Van der Sterren champion in that case? Is he? Only if he finishes 0.5pts behind the first ranked player. If the 1st has one more point than VdS it gets equal if you substract 1 point from the 1st if the 1st won the computer. >9. Can a national chess federation oblige somebody to play a computer? IMO > this can NEVER be the case. It will depend, as written above, if the federation allows programs to participate who have been written by a human of the same nationality. This is a fundamental question. If the federation allows it there is no reason to refuse to play as the program should be seen like any other player/participant. >I'll be very interested in the comments of other readers of CCC on these >questions! Thanks in advance and have a good day. > >Jeroen
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