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Subject: Re: The timed-out Crafty - Ban game

Author: Bruce Moreland

Date: 17:19:19 11/05/99

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On November 05, 1999 at 17:40:59, Amir Ban wrote:

>
>One benefit of the ban-crafty debate of a few days ago is that I learned how to
>use the ICC 'search' command and discovered that it gives much more information
>than I thought it did.
>
>I went looking for the game in which crafty timed out when ban had insufficient
>material. I found it, very easily, and it's listed below. It took place on
>October 7th, i.e. 4 weeks ago.
>
>If you add up the crafty times (or easier, use ICC 'examine'), you will see that
>crafty had 2:19 minutes on the last move, but did not make a move till time ran
>out.
>
>The first reaction to this by Bob & others was that I was making this up. The
>second reaction was that crafty crashed or hung, so I looked for the game crafty
>played next, and I discovered that ban started another game with crafty 15
>minutes after this game started, meaning immediately after this game ended. So
>crafty did not crash or hang.
>
>I include below the ICC commands I typed in (in quotes), and the ICC output
>including the game moves & information.
>
>I tried messaging Bob on ICC to tell him that, but this is impossible as he's
>censoring me. I assume he has interest in this.

I don't understand why you bring this up again.

Here is my viewpoint.  You are sitting there playing chess, the game is a draw
and you are a pawn down.  Your opponent, sits there and flags rather than
offering a draw or playing on, which is scored as a draw because you have
insufficient material.  Possibilities:

1) The program had some software difficulty and stopped making moves.

2) The operator deliberately threw a wrench into his own program's spokes in
order to waste two minutes of your time, then lied about it later.

Sorry, but I gotta go with option 1.  If Bob had wanted to screw you over it
would have made much more sense to simply grab the newspaper and head off to the
bathroom.  You would have had to sit there making manual moves in a pointless
game, which would have annoyed you for a longer period and would have achieved
the same result.

If you want to find reason to accuse your opponent of being evil, this is very
thin.

I found something interesting with "search", too.  "search crafty ban mode=tm"
returns 3 games.  Did you look at the third one?  It's an old game back from
when you were automatic, and it is very similar to this one, with the situation
reversed, and only 33 seconds of dead time rather than 2:19.

bruce



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