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Subject: Is there a statistician in the house?

Author: Larry Proffer

Date: 07:19:52 05/08/01


"Braingames explain their reasoning. "We made a simple decision. We wanted
programs which could play on multi-processor platforms as they are obviously
stronger candidates for the Kramnik match. There are really only three
candidates: Fritz, Junior and Shredder. We made great efforts to persuade
Shredder to play but they declined." They added that they unfortunately didn't
have time for a tournament with 10 programs which would have taken too long to
run. One of the main complainants was the company REBEL. Their TIGER program is
a single processor prgram yet still finished second in the Cadaques event run by
Prof. Irazoqui earlier in the year. They actually have a multi-processor version
called DEEP TIGER but that wasn't announced until after the invitations were
made."


Shortage of time is now the weak(?) excuse.

We know they had time for a 24 game match between two programs. This produces a
winner with a degree of confidence that this winner is 'objectively' the best
comp-comp program. Can anyone calculate this degree of confidence?

If Tiger was included, then they would have been in the situation of needing to
play a match between three programs. Since they were intending to play a three
program match anyway (with Shredder as the third), one can assume that they'ld
have had time to include Tiger anyway. However .....

But, and my question is this: suppose they played a 24 game match with three
programs; my weak maths suggests that instead of each program playing 24 games
(as in 2-player match), each program would play 16 games for a 24 game match
with three players;

then: what is the degree of confidence that the 'winner' is  'objectively' the
best?

Is it actually much different to the degree of confidence for the 2-player
match?

How many more games are needed to reach the same degree of confidence as the
2-player match?

Is the 'time available' argument strong or weak?






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