Author: Keith Ian Price
Date: 21:13:51 10/24/97
Go up one level in this thread
On October 24, 1997 at 01:48:10, Bruce Moreland wrote: >I was just talking to Bob, and we came up with the following. He hasn't >seen this, so if he has a disagreement, it is my problem not his. > >You have three tournaments, you do one each year, in sequence. > >1) WCCC. Open hardware. > >2) WMCCC. Open hardware, size restriction on the computer, and it has >to be single-processor. The idea is to give the off-brand machines >their due. > >3) WUPCCC. Uniform platform (and I personally would hope uniform >operating system, guess which one). The idea is to go straight down the >middle of the PC mainstream and see who can do best on the machine your >mom just bought at Compu-Whatever with her two thousand bucks. > >If someone has an exotic micro platform, you kill everyone in year two, >but in year three you either port it to x86 and suffer performance >problems, or you pass that year. > >Alternatively, since the WUPCCC would be run on a uniform platform and >maybe a uniform operating system, someone could write auto-player >software (not necessarily Donninger's), that would let us play the event >via remote-control, possibly even extending the tournament to a larger >number of rounds, or a series of two-game matches each round, or >whatever. So perhaps we could do a WUPCCC every year, and have the >other two events like we do now. Don't we already have the SSDF for this? I personally think the hoopla over your Alpha and Bob's is silly. I am interested to see if Crafty plays significantly better in a 64-bit environment, to decide if an Alpha would be a worthwhile purchase. If Crafty were to win the tournament on an Alpha, and CSTal came in 5th on a 200Mhz K6, I would not think that CSTal was not good enough to buy, as the results of an eleven round tournament do not indicate anything with enough probability to decide anything. About the only way someone could score big from the WMCCC, in my opinion, were if they were amongst the only ones not to bring their own super hardware, and ran on the supplied hardware, and still won. I believe this is what Fritz did in '95. But I think it is a failure to understand the market for high-level chess programs, when there is this much worry over the hardware. The mass-market programs could benefit from winning, but the I think on those, the price is still more telling than the fact they won something. So even if CSTal were to win the WMCCC,in the mass market people would still buy CM5k for $29, rather than the WMCCC winner for $60. I would like to ban the 767Mhz Alphas, since it is unlikely anyone could purchase one if they liked the play at that level. But then again, it might reveal insights for the programmers running them on improvements they could make for slower hardware. > >In a year when we couldn't get sponsorship for one of the first two >events, at least we could have a WUPCCC, since it would easier to >organize. > >bruce I suppose if it were long enough to be statistically significant, then it would have an advantage over the SSDF by allowing "lesser" programs to compete on equal hardware also. But such a long tourney might prove too tiring for most and would only run once, I fear. kp
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