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Subject: Re: Rough framework for an ICC Computer Championship

Author: Bruce Moreland

Date: 18:37:36 11/13/99

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On November 13, 1999 at 18:39:07, Peter Kappler wrote:

>1) Only one entry per program.  The operator must be the author, or a person
>directly appointed by the author.

I'm frightened by this "directly appointed" thing.  I don't want to deal with
situations where someone sends their program to someone else who has faster
hardware, and that someone else has no idea how to operate the program, has
never operated in a tournament before, perhaps has never played in a tournament,
has questionable morals, and is not accountable to anyone because they are
essentially anonymous.

I am not trying to make it look like I'm trying to keep anyone on bad hardware,
but I'm trying to make sure that this is an event between people involved with
the programs, rather than having it be an event between random people who have
nothing to do with any of this.

I don't want to sit in my office for four hours monitoring or operating some
game, while my opponent program's author does something he considers more
important.

>2) Open platform.  There is simply no way to enforce uniform hardware.

Fine with me, but there is going to be a pretty big disparity.

>3) A time control somewhere between G/60 and G/90, with a small (<10 sec) time
>increment per move.

Faster is better but I don't care.

Gotta know whether this will be manual or automatic, and if the operator needs
to be present if an automatic interface is used (I hope and assume yes).

>4) A Swiss pairing system.  Looks like there will be too many participants for
>any form of round robin.

Yes.  I'd prefer more rounds and faster time controls rather than fewer rounds
and slower time controls, or slow time controls with lots of rounds and the
whole thing taking a month.

> (I'm in US Pacific: GMT-8)

Me too.

>It seems likely that we can get ICC to promote this event.  Peter McKenzie and I
>had a conversation with an ICC admin this morning - he's interested in this
>idea.  ICC would probably want to call it the "ICC Computer Championship", which
>seems appropriate.  ICC could also probably supply one or two admins to act as
>tournament directors.  It's possible that we could use one of the automated ICC
>"tomato" bots to generate pairings, but I'm not sure how we'd deal with first
>round seedings...

Be careful that they don't eat it.  ICC could wreck it, for instance they could
arbitrarily state that any (C) account could enter, and suddenly we have fifty
crafties.  I strongly suggest that ICC does not determine the rules, and that
they do not determine the participants.

I'm a little worried about dealing with an ICC tournament director.  I would
rather try to get Valvo or someone like that.  That would cost money though.

>I can think of some other technical issues, like how to handle the case where
>someone loses their internet connection in the middle of the round.  How has
>this been handled at computer events in the past?

At computer events it's really bad.  Hopefully it won't happen.  If it does
happen, allowances need to be made, within limits.  I don't want a game to go on
for six hours though.

>A final note:  A few of you posted that you'd prefer an event that was held over
>a longer period of time, where the round times weren't necessarily fixed, and
>the participants could schedule games on their own.  My experience is that these
>events lose their appeal after a few weeks.  It's hard to keep the interest
>level high over a longer period of time.

Icky icky.  I am not interested in this kind of thing at all.  I want the event
to be promoted, and you can't promote an event with no schedule.  Also, I'm not
interested in waiting two weeks for a round to end, because a few of the players
decided to adjourn their games four or five times.  We might as well do this via
autoplayer while everone sleeps, and that's boring.  There needs to be
interaction between humans or this event might as well not happen.

bruce




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