Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 13:33:46 11/12/98
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On November 12, 1998 at 08:30:20, Robert Hyatt wrote: >As I said before, you simply *DON'T* accuse someone of cheating unless you are >*certain*. And if you yourself have been caught cheating in the past (can you >spell Polgar?) then you *really* ought to be careful with the accusation. The >Be4/Qb6 issue *could* have been explained if he had investigated... Because >both Bruce and I played with this and found that Qb6 doesn't win a pawn as he >so boldly and forcefully proclaimed. And if he had invested that time, none of >this would have happened. Or if he had simply kept his mouth shut *until* he >had time to properly investigate, he would also have not said anything. But he >just opened his mouth and inserted his foot promptly... I looked at some of these positions. I don't remember which ones. I know for sure that I looked at that position where DB played Be4. Mine didn't want to play Be4 in a day or two, but it was moving up the list of candidates, and the score for the move it wanted to play was at or near zero. I don't really care if the move won a pawn or didn't win a pawn or lost the game, or whatever, other than minimally. What I was interested in determining, and what has been determined to my satisfaction is that a program could be less optimistic about these positions than all of the people who were watching thought it must have been. It is my contention that during that point of that game, DB spent a lot of time because it had been optimistic up until then, but was beginning to realize that it was going to be a draw. I have no evidence to support this other than it took a long to move, there have been references made to "panic time" in the newspaper, and that mine experienced a score drop when set to think for a long time. I think that DB made a human-looking move out of sheer frustration. I think that a cheating accusation could come out of this is insane, and that it could be supported by anyone in the computer chess community is even more insane. To suggest this is not just to say that one person suffered a serious moral lapse, it's to suggest that the whole team was morally bankrupt, since I assume they would have had to conspire to do this, and in order to execute such a stunt in real-time they may have even had to organize this beforehand. That is an incredibly serious thing to suggest based upon, 1) incomprehensible output (everyone raise your hand who has written a program that produces output only understandable by you); 2) extra time added to a search, which we all do for one reason or another, and it's easy to determine that there could be a reason to do so here; 3) the accusations of the opponent, who is not a technical person, and who has no way of knowing what the thing was capable of *without* cheating, although he might think he does. If DB every plays again I would hope that they would make their output more readable in case this happens again. bruce
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