Author: Dieter Buerssner
Date: 13:21:52 05/03/05
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On May 02, 2005 at 16:24:53, Steven Edwards wrote: >Looking at the announcement's General and Tournament rules, I see that the 2005 >WCCC games are to played via manual communication and not by automated messaging >such as an ICS protocol. This is the same as it was from over thirty years ago. The typical ICSes don't support the time control used at WCC. I am not aware of any ICS that support it. Neither does the Winboard/Xboard protocol support such time controls. There are some engines, that don't support WB or XB protocol. Sure, they could implement it. But then you might have an unfortunate situation, that there might be some excluded for technical reasons (at least, they could argue so). With manual operation, there is nobody excluded for technical reasons. Also, one can really use an "all written by myself package". For example, in the Paderborn tournament, I attended, I used my engine in console mode. No interface to ICS available then. I also would not want to implement it, neither would I want to implement some Web stuff. At Paderborn, they still had a good method, to make the games available to the public - the engine would just write a PGN on some network drive. But already this may be not trivial to setup, when you are not using Windows. I actually considered, to use a pure DOS engine with a DOS extender, that has no support for virtual memory. This gives some speed advantage (when using huge hash tables - you won't need one indirection for the conversion of virtual adresses to physical adresses). No practical way, to use such a setup in automated play. There is also the social aspect. The tournament in Paderborn, for many players is a nice social event. Of course, you can argue, that this is just some sort of luxury, these players want. I'd agree. If you make automatic play available, there would be no real need, to be at the place. But cheating possibilities would be much higher, than in a typical human operated event. No doubt, the cheating possibilities will also be there, for a human operated event. But with pure remote access, it is so much easier. You could write an interface, that drives several different engines (on different computers), and have a human make the move decision. Would work with CCT rules, and probably nobody could detect it (the interface would be clever enough, to kibitz the correct PV, of course). Taking over the time allocation for the engine would be rather easy. This is already easily possible of course with WCCC and other similar events, which allow remote computers. No - I don't believe, that anybody will cheat in this way (yet?). I agree with advantages, you mentioned. Just wanted to give some other view. Regards, Dieter
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