Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 14:01:59 07/12/98
Go up one level in this thread
On July 12, 1998 at 16:33:18, Don Dailey wrote: >>>if you are talking about the WCCC, never fear...I'll do my best to have >>>an entry ready and I'll be there, because these events are only 5 rounds >>>with 2 on the weekend. > >By the way, WCCC will be a 5 day event, Monday through Friday. I think >it will be 1 round on Monday, and then 2 per day to get 9 rounds. > >The time control will be faster than the old 40/2 time control. >This was all discussed at the last WCCC. > >- Don Someone didn't think very clearly. The reason the WCCC (and ACM) events have been held partially on weekends was to make it easier for big-iron computer chess programs to enter. We never had any problem with time on saturday/sunday, but monday-friday was always a real problem, because that's when these computers are heavily used. The WCCC does *not* need 32 entries. It should be limited to 16 at most, and that's not hard to do. There is no need in making it "open to everyone" because that only drives up the number of rounds. with 16 programs, 4 rounds will get a clear 1st place (ignoring draws) while 5 rounds gets a clear 1-4 places (again ignoring draws). The micro-based programs will not have a problem, but there's not a lot of chance in getting top-of-the-line big iron for 5 days, 9 rounds, which means rounds in *prime-time* during the day. Was this discussed at all? Someone has forgotten where we came from, quite obviously. This has been an issue since 1970 at the first ACM event, and if you look back, every tournament I have played in has had at least two rounds on Sunday, with the remaining rounds on mon-tue nights. We have even had round 1 on sat, rounds 2-3 on sun, and so forth. But the point is, to get *serious* computers (IE a 16 cpu 21264 alpha) there's little chance of asking for one for a whole week, monday-friday all day. That's not reasonable. So I assume that the WCCC decision-makers have decided that "big iron is out and this is just going to become another WMCCC-type event with a few special cases thrown in when someone can do better than one cpu?" Sad decision, because the WCCC has always been "bring the best you can round up, we'll make scheduling as painless as possible." Cray Blitz would *never* have been a world champion with a 9 round tournament monday-friday. Neither would chess 4.x... we couldn't get that kind of machine time arranged... It was hard enough to get it on mon-tue nites at 7:30pm... But if it is really going to be mon-fri, I suppose this is another "count me out." We couldn't play in Hong Kong because the time difference put the games right in the middle of the day over here. No way I'm going to bug anyone to ask for an expensive piece of computer equipment for a week, during the day, because I know what the answer will be: "so what about this event, Deep Blue is already proven to be the best there is, we have no interest in throwing away machine time during the day when we could be selling it or using it to develop software that will make us some money.." As the saying goes, "been there, done that... " :)
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