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Subject: Re: The clock in game 1 Adams - DJ

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 02:56:03 02/17/00

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On February 16, 2000 at 20:17:36, Amir Ban wrote:

Thanks for the explanation,

we (computerchessprogrammers) are enemy of the grandmasterstate.

I guess you had to pay quite some thousands of dollars
for participation in this tournament to the Kasparov organisation.
Didn't you sign a contract to prevent them nailing you down in such
a way?

I've been on the internet since 93 now. First 4 years i had to do without
timestamp from europe, so i simply didn't play. end of 97 i had internet
on my PC. though there is timestamp, it's crucial for me to survive *any*
level.

At the world champs 99 internet, despite that i pay big bugs for several
providers just to be able to internet quickly, didn't work during 2
days (sunday and saturday), or round 1 against Ferret and round 6 against
Francesca.

Of course the clock was stopped shortly, but not for many hours, so i had
to play WITHOUT internet connection, and was lucky to have a small computer
with me and was lucky for the organization to have a monitor for me.

In dutch champs i was connected to the phone line and only for 15 minutes
had a problem with xs4all.nl. xs4all.nl really has served me well over
the years. All problems i ever had were not xs4all.nl related, but other
ISPS.

At the CCT tournament, played at the icc server, my problems were again
huge. Whole europe had problems in fact. Just by starting games half an
hour later, and one game when problems were biggest (i arrived 1 hour
later at icc) lucky Junior had refused to play crafty. That was pure luck
for me, as otherwise DIEP would not have played.

Diep has played at 3 different machines for the icc tournament, with
as absolute worste moment that i had to hand operate a machine from europe.

After the icc tournament Sean discovered that the machine i was supposed
to play on (dual xeon 550, and where diep didn't run a single game at)
had a bad network cable, which caused all the disconnects.

In paderborn for a few weeks at the IPCCC tournament i again used xs4all.nl,
this time equipped with even more providers and passwords to find a route
that wouldn't let me down.

Still in game 2 against Shredder i was simply disconnected and couldn't
connect to the crafty machine in not a single way. I was lucky to have
a backup computer in Florida from Ahmad Altani, otherwise i would have had
to resign the game or play at my P133 laptop with 16mb ram and windows NT
on it (swap swap). The move i reconnected with was a direct blunder,
caused by cleaned hashtables and a bunch of processors less. The problem
wasn't in paderborn, but somewhere at i-p-d.nl.

Overall, in europe i have had a lot of troubles connecting using internet.
Actually i never have had a tournament without problems. Biggest were
problems at the world champs. One biggest problems i had at the CCT
tournament. A lot less problems at IPCCC2000 (though the average
delay was like 10 seconds) and Dutch open ran near to smoothly.

At home at the worst ISP of europe (but i don't need to pay for the phone
then): casema.net, i usually have lot of delay and such, but less than i've
had in the different tournaments, most definitely because a realtime connection
is so much harder to maintain for hours than just internetting a few hours
without probs.

It's incredible that you paid all those dollars to play games
using the internet against dudes that consider us enemey of the grandmaster
state.

Nevertheless i think your PR will be good. I had you after Ng6 at +4.39

Vincent

>Lots of people want to know what caused the delays and clock issues in game 1.
>Here's what I know:

>The game was delayed by an hour and 40 minutes, for several reasons on Adams
>side in Bermuda: His computer didn't work. He switched to Seirawan's computer
>where the mouse didn't work, and finally he wanted to play with "move
>verification" to protect himself against mouse slips so the KC people organized
>this for him.
>
>The ISP of KC in Israel Internet-Zahav were having a very bad evening, and
>Internet was very slow. In the middle of the game I noticed delays of about 5-10
>seconds between Junior's clock and the KC tournament clock. This got worse and
>worse as the game continued.
>
>By the way, Deep Junior ran automatic. KC do have the timestamp feature like in
>ICC, but for some reason it was not installed in the tournament tonight. This
>was just one item in a string of fiascos.
>
>Move 29 was not a communication problem. DJ considered Ng6, and the score came
>down badly, from about 1.10 to 0.56 I think, so it went into deep overtime. It
>still came out of it with 13 minutes left, an after that guessed the move for
>several moves and played instantly, so I wasn't concerned over it.
>
>Several moves later the Internet went into a near coma. On the last few moves,
>we lost several minutes due to lag for each move. I had a notebook with a KC
>viewer applet and an ICC window, and in the last moves we actually saw the moves
>reported on ICC *before* they showed up on the KC viewer :( Soon afterward the
>Internet crashed. Those of you who noted the final clocks saw it on the KC
>server in the US, but in fact the clocks were stopped after we were disconnected
>for several minutes.
>
>Much else happened after that, of course, but that's a different story, and I
>need to get some sleep now.
>
>Amir



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