Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 08:49:11 12/30/03
Go up one level in this thread
On December 29, 2003 at 12:36:01, Daniel Clausen wrote:
>On December 29, 2003 at 11:27:40, Christophe Theron wrote:
>
>[snip]
>
>>I am less and less interested in participating in tournaments. They are just
>>lotteries.
>>
>>I think that playing more games (and using faster time controls so playing a lot
>>of games becomes possible) would be good, and I could then reconsider.
>
>I think the problem is not really that tournaments are lotteries. Afterall, they
>always were, to a certain extend. And not just in sports, everywhere.
Which does not add anything to their scientific value. Only to their
psychological importance maybe.
> I think
>the problem is that the results of these tournaments are so important.
The fact that people give them so much importance shows how misinformed the
general audience is. Even a more specialized audience like the CCC readers are
still badly misinformed, even after years of education on the subject.
> If people
>were less subjective but more objective, they would see these tournaments as
>fun-events and when it comes to real strength they would consider a rating list
>which includes _a lot_ of games. (although, as Vincent posted recently, the SSDF
>probably also has their own problems (I don't know whether it's true or not
>since I'm not involved at all in this, but it sounds likely to me that some of
>his claims are valid there))
There is no comparison between the result of any tournament and the SSDF list.
The SSDF list is light years ahead. It is highly valuable.
>It's sad if commercial programmers have to decide it's better for them not to
>show up at all than risk a bad rank in a major tournament. But I guess that's
>just the way it is. (pesky customers! :o)
It's not only a question of risk. There is the energy involved in trying to get
the most powerful hardware.
Tournaments in general cannot give any reliable result.
But tournaments where people are allowed to use any hardware they can find
(non-uniform platform tournaments) are a pure nonsense.
Christophe
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