Author: Ratko V Tomic
Date: 09:25:20 09/27/99
Go up one level in this thread
> >>Which probably donated hardware and software for exactly this reason, >>at least to the key SSDF decision makers. How convenent, right for >>the Christmas shopping season. > >Of course we have never received a single cent or any hardware from any company >including Chessbase. Members own and pay their computers pay their own >telephone-bills etc. Feel free to like or dislike the result of the list but I >think you should either show up any evidence or leave the discussions in this >forum. > I said "probably donated." If I knew exactly who, what, when... I would have said so. As to why "probably," it is an elementary probablity excercise. There are at least 10 top level programs. SSDF picked 4 to test on the fastest hardware and these 4 happened to be CB programs. What are the odds for this? If we assume 10 candidates (4 CB programs and 6 non-CB programs) for the fastest machines there are 210 ways to pick 4 out of 10. Only one pick will have all 4 from CB, hence the odds for this are 1/210 approx 0.48 percent. If you had only 9 candidates (with 4 CB, 5 non-CB), the odds are 1/126, i.e. 0.79 percent. With 8 candidates the odds are 1/70 i.e. 1.4 percent. Since we're dealing with a pick which has a significant effect on the CB's financial gain, the odds against the particular pick (99.5 percent) and the gain imply to anyone with at least .48 percent of common sense still operational that some funny things happened behind the scenes. Whether it is a free hardware, paid travel to tournaments, or whatever else the creative marketing gurus can think up of these days as an incentive to reviewers, it is quite probable that some CB->SSDF incentive mechanism did exist. It happens in every other business, why would chess software evaluation be exempt from the laws of human nature and the laws of probability? > >I think this accusations is far over the hill. > How far does an SSDF pick need to bend the odds before a suspicion is not over the hill? Would 99.99 percent against the odds, instead of 99.52 percent, be enough?
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