Author: Peter McKenzie
Date: 11:43:32 01/26/00
Go up one level in this thread
On January 26, 2000 at 07:17:05, Enrique Irazoqui wrote: >About being "World champion, the rest is details", it's a classic case of >hypostatization, which is "to attribute real identity to a concept." ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ what a scary big word! > >1. We create a Swiss tournament of 11 rounds and name it World Championship. WCCC99 was 7 rounds, plus a playoff game. >2. Program X wins the tournament and becomes World Champion. >3. We are to believe that program X is the best because it is the World Champion >and the rest is details. I didn't say you must believe that program X is the best, I said that program X (Shredder in this case) is World Champion. > >If this 11 round tournament would have given another name, for instance ICCA >championship, steps 2 and 3 wouldn't cross anybody's mind. The ICCA World Computer Chess Championship is a tournament with considerable prestige and tradition. Therefore, the participants (almost all of the strongest computer chess systems) went to great efforts to win. This included: - special opening book preparation. This includes killer lines, and also just playing lines that most suit a program. - using the latest enhanced versions of programs, often versions that aren't available for others to tune against. - using the fastest possible hardware available (eg. see multi-cpu machines of Ferret, Fritz, Junior, CilkChess, P.Conners, Zugzwang, Diep. Even Hiarcs and Shredder has very fast PIII machines with huge ram). This event was a no-holds barred, take no prisoners event. You only had to be there to understand that everyone was very serious about winning. No excuses were available, except 'bad-luck' which of course is a factor but not as large as some would make out. In my opinion, winning the World Computer Chess Championship was a very significant achievement. Far more impressive than topping the SSDF list for example. > >With this I don't intend to attack Shredder 4, Junior 4.6 or Fritz 3, all fine >programs and none of them the best, but to question the meaning of a name. > >No human would become world champion after playing a total of 11 games in his >life, and I don't think programs should either. > >Enrique
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