Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 07:25:47 11/14/99
Go up one level in this thread
On November 13, 1999 at 18:39:07, Peter Kappler wrote: > >Thanks to all of you who responded to my previous post. I'm pleasantly >surprised by the positive reaction so far. Based on the responses, a few >guidelines for this tournament seem clear: > >1) Only one entry per program. The operator must be the author, or a person >directly appointed by the author. Right excellent with this exception that the programmer must be online and watch the game if someone else runs it. Any problem or whatever is blamed on the programmer if it goes wrong, even though an operator might make the moves. Playing programs that get operated by someone else i am doing every day at the internet chess club. The only interesting thing in this contest for me is that one can meet other programmers, at a tournament level instead of the usual blitz level. >2) Open platform. There is simply no way to enforce uniform hardware. Excellent. >3) A time control somewhere between G/60 and G/90, with a small (<10 sec) time >increment per move. g/60 sucks bigtime, doing that right now (30 30 level) against crafty. >4) A Swiss pairing system. Looks like there will be too many participants for >any form of round robin. I have no problems being online for 12 hours a day. With game at 90 x level we talk about 4 hours a game at maximum (including lag). That are 3 games a day easily, as getting to the bathroom, eating and such is very easy as you're at home (and especially if you're unattended). >One of the more complex issues is how many rounds, and what time of day to play. We should just pick the day and then appoint that at least 2 rounds get played that day. As seemingly only the biggest computerchess fans join this contest it's easy to demand from some of us to get up in the morning very early, or play till the morning hours (in my case). > One drawback of holding a tournament online is that the participants are >scattered across different time zones. This means the rounds must be timed >carefully, so we aren't playing games at the crack of dawn in the West, or late >at night in the East. > >Almost all of the participants live between GMT-8 and GMT+1. This spans the >west coast of the USA to Germany, I think. I'm only aware of two potential >participants who fall outside of this windows: Amir Ban, in Israel, and Peter >McKenzie in New Zealand. (Peter has already said he can handle a few late >nights for a good tourney...) >If we played 60+10, then each round would easily finish in under 3 hours, and we >could play two games per day without much trouble. The early round could start At 90 0 we can do easily 3 rounds a day. Any weekend tournament (non-computerchess) i play 3 rounds a day at a level of 2 hours a game. I play myselve there, now we only need to operate having a coca cola this computer. Half of the participants can even devote all their time to chatting as it runs unattended. >at 1700 GMT, and the late round would start at 2000 GMT, finishing at around >2300 GMT. A bit late in Europe, but not too bad. A 90+10 time control is also >doable, it just means starting at 1600 GMT, and finishing around midnight GMT. I don't see it. What's wrong with 3 rounds 90 5 a day? I figured out that the only DOS program is Rebel, and Jeroen is a quick operator so he'll manage that in under 5 seconds a move. >The bottom line is that we can probably only manage 2 rounds per day, so I think >we'd need to play for two weekends, which would be 8 total rounds. I completely disagree here. 3 rounds a day is very easy to do. 8 rounds sucks in all respects. The few dudes that are attended either have a big team that can operate the program continuesly, and the few ones that are attended and on their own don't mind operating a bit. If that might exhaust people too much (12 hours) then my comment is: "he this is a tournament, not a sunny day on the beach". >I'd like to hear some discussion on the issues of time controls and start times. > It might be useful to compile a list of the time zones where we all live. (I'm >in US Pacific: GMT-8) > > >On to other issues: > >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 There comes trouble. Hell no. Never leave it to ICC, that's the worst thing you can do. Don't listen to them, ignore them. If they cause trouble, then we can go play at fics, chess.net, GICS, DICS or whatever. >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... No way. We don't want to do this. Giving this in the hands of ICC is the last thing i would vote for. Organizing tournaments like this is very easy. I'm doing it regurarly. Previous week i did it on a weekly basis even. There are many very good programs to generate pairings, which even everyone is allowed to download so that one sees in advance who one might play. >Another question is when should event should take place? I don't have strong >feelings about this, except that I think we need to allow enough time for people >to free up two weekends, plus it would be nice to give time for word to spread >about the tournament. Finally, many of us would want time to prepare for such an >event. My feeling is that it shouldn't take place before the end of December. >Christmas Day and New Years Day both fall on a Saturday this year - those >weekends are probably out of the question. The ICC admin I spoke with said he >would prefer not to have this coincide with the Wijk aan Zee super-GM >tournament, which he thought was sometime in January. I told you ICC only gives trouble. I feel everyone is very busy till the end of the year. There is a Spanish computer chess championship at the end of the year i plan to join that, also many BIG tournaments are near the end of the year, and next week in germany a big COMPUTERCHESS event start. It's cool to organize it during the super GM tournament, as that might by accident generate a few watchers to our games. I've been broadcasting games from the world championship, from the dutch open and from the german open, and except for a single game, hardly anyone is INTERESTED in computerchess games. The only game that took a few spectators, because it was at an american time, and because it was the tie for the world title, was Shredder-Ferret. At dutch open i got announcements from ICC, but that hardly generated people. Grandmasters commenting doesn't attract people either. Only grandmasters playing attracts people, and only at american times, so say from 9 PM CET, peaking at say about 1 AM CET. >The timing of the event isn't too important to me, except that I wouldn't want >to rush it. What do others think? It is a cool idea to try to announce the programs, but we know in advance that near to no one is gonna watch it, apart from a few dudes that write MSGs here at CCC. >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? all internet ches cafe's already handle that by mean of timestamp. I know from experience that connection in europe is a big problem. At world championship i could NOT play 2 games at Bobs machine, because in EUROPE the internet sucked so much. To say that i was pissed is a bit of an understatement. Someone having a T3 near his home probably doesn't care about others, but i think that there is already so much room for cheating that it would be very bad to suddenly care about a bit of lag, though one can already fool programs like Blitzin so easy that this kind of cheating we should simply skip and let the timestamp from the server handle this. >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. Well, when i posted this idea i didn't intend to appoint for a round and only get results back a couple of weeks later. It seems to me that there is enough room to believe now that no one minds to get up early or get late to bed. That's simply part of the game with such a tournament! So any idea on this i hereby withdraw. Let's all start at the same time! >As always, I welcome feedback. I'm sure I've missed some issues, too. When we >think we have everything worked out, we can start serious discussions with the >people at ICC. Wrong idea. First setup a tournament with rounds and schedules and the program's name that you use to pair participants (though i volunteer doing that part), so that there is not a single misunderstanding or room for unclear details. After that we go start playing somewhere, and if that's icc, then so be it, setting up a game is fairly easy. If any admin then plans to help us that's very nice and bigtime appreciated, as a very low game number (say 1, 2 or 3) is of course attracting another dude. We should however ask for a setup then in such a way that guests can watch these games too, as the few serious spectators we can expect might not be on icc normally and don't like to pay to just watch a few games. Note that anyone who wants to practice is invited to do so at icc, just match either Moron, Secret, Triskelon, Judgeturpin, and some others. >--Peter
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