Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 11:58:45 11/07/97
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I have two comments about the tournament: 1. No outside communication is a stupid mistake to make. And it was not just this year's "problem of the week" either. There was *no* information flowing out of Jakarta in a timely fashion either, except there were machines on the internet handy where I could get email information and then post it. The ICCA needs to figure out that this is not just for the participants that are present, but it is also an event for the participants that are not present, and also for the folks that are simply interested in computer chess in general. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to set up a modem connection. I gave a demo in Paris a few years back with Cray Blitz, and my local radio shack sold me every connector I needed. Same thing for the Levy match in 1984 where we brought our own terminal and modem. It does require that someone ask rather than stumbling into the playing hall sight unseen. But it is clearly doable. As I said before, if I were running a business and asked one of my employees to set up a communication link for something this important, and he let it fall apart like this did, I'd simply fire him on the spot and find someone that was capable of doing it right the next time. Again, this is *not* rocket science. 2. A few TD decisions seemed oddball. The initial two rounds that were accelerated made no sense, and caused a few problems later on. IE, you'd really like to see things decided near the end with the two leaders slugging it out, rather than having the two leaders play others because they had already met earlier. The explanations on this sort of pairing have always been quite clear, "they are appropriate when log2(n-players) is greater than the number of rounds." That didn't fit this tournament at all, since 6 rounds was more than enough to produce a clear winner, and there were 5 left over for good measure. It didn't wreck anything, but simply seemed pointless. And from some of the initial seedings, it actually hurt some a little. Ah well, on to next year. Hopefully someone will ride herd a little more carefully on the internet communication next year, and get information *out* in a timely manner, no matter where it is held. Two consecutive years of little data (this year was much worse than last, but both were poor when you consider Aegon's live coverage on their web site) does not make for happy campers...
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