Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 10:49:40 08/16/00
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A tournament of approximate peers is largely a crap-shoot. Anyone can win, including a program that isn't the best. Considering the recent CCC tournament where crafty won by a landslide, we might consider crafty a favorite. But Shredder and Junior have had recent and very impressive results. Ferret has had some near misses. Who can discount Fritz? In other words, nobody knows who will win. That's why we go ahead and run the contest. The stronger your program is, the higher probability it will win. So there is a clear correlation between strength and outcome. But you could have a bad book line come up by pure random chance and cost you the tournament, even though your program is the strongest by 100 ELO. We often think of machines as completely deterministic -- like a light switch or something of that nature. But they are not. IRQ's happen, memory gets paged, all sorts of quasi-random events occur which can change the outcome of a calculation. All the competitors are worthy and I think any of them can win it, though some will have a much higher liklihood than others.
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