Maybe you should try single-core next year

[Laskos]

A limit of 12-plies, maybe Rybka won't win? I'll be interesting to see what the anti-Rybka camp comes up with next.

Funny, 12 Rybka plies mean 14-15 Fritz plies and 15-17 Junior plies. Rybka will win with 100% score. The idea is ridiculous, as programmers will start tweaking ply depth showed.

Kai

[Nid Hogge]

Yeah,I can understand you now Nid....my post was not intended to offence you by the way....
All I want to say is that Harvey has the full freedom to or not to comment regarding the hardware limitation issue....
Things had shown up,next year we hope to see the changes....
Dr.D

Hey, No problem at all. I made my point. My best goes to all whom participated in the WCCC, HIARCS included.

Thank You,

[hgm]

The only point you made reflects back on yourself. Seldom have I seen such a childish and non-sensical post as yours...

[M ANSARI]

I think all this has been played out way too far. Although I think that the hardware limit was a total fiasco and basically absurd, especially when it turns out that some participants were able to get the latest and greatest Intel 8 core offering which is not readily available or affordable by most participants. I thought the whole idea of doing the hardware limit was to make it more fair to the other non financially loaded participants ... well that surely failed miserably.

Still I think that blaming Harvey for it is totally unfounded. After all there are quite a few people that support his view ... even though IMHO it is totally wrong. Harvey has been a great promoter of computer chess and is extremely active and useful to the community ... while we may disagree, there must be better ways of making changes than making this entire thing personal.

[hgm]

There has been a players meeting at the WCCC to evaluate the 8-core rule, and it turns out that there are _many_ participants that actually support the 8-core rule, or some other form of hardware limitation. And most players that do so, have good arguments for it, which have a lot larger perspective than a petty "I have better chances to win that way".

Why some fanatical Rybka lovers see the 8-core rule as an anti-Rybka conspiracy is totally beyond me. In fact, it is Rybka who will profit most from such a rule, as it is the strongest program on equal hardware. If there are only two participants running on 5000 cores, the others limited for financial reasons to 4 or 8, the championship will be decided by the single game between those two. And even if you are 200 Elo better, there is a fair chance that you might not win this single game.

But if a both programs will meet 6 or 8 opponents that are not too far below them in rating, the chances that the stronger one will win is way larger.

So the title of this thread not only shows unjustified petty gloating at the expense of one of the most sporting exponents of computer Chess, it also shows total lack of comprehension of the issue...

[Dave Gomboc]

There has been a players meeting at the WCCC to evaluate the 8-core rule, and it turns out that there are _many_ participants that actually support the 8-core rule, or some other form of hardware limitation. And most players that do so, have good arguments for it, which have a lot larger perspective than a petty "I have better chances to win that way".

Care to elucidate?

I'm not particularly invested in the question of whether the hardware should be limited or not. Given that ICGA chose to limit hardware, why didn't they also call it an WMCCC instead of a WCCC to be consistent with past practice?

Dave

[hgm]

The most common argument of proponents for limited hardware was to not scare away amateurs from the tournament. It is not likely that more than two or three participants could afford clusters of 1000+ CPUs, and it is clear that a tournament with only two or three participants will not be viable.

For commercial programs, playing on large clusters is not very attractve, as their main customer base does not have such clusters. So it was coined that if a limit is to be imposed, at the current level of technology a quad would be a more logical choice than an octal. Quads are more or less standard now, in the consumer market.

It was discussed if it would not be better to require completely equal hardware, in stead of a limit on the number of cores. (And then have the organization provide the hardware, which would also solve the ever recurring problems tha accompany remote play.) Most participants felt that this was not strictly necessary, and a core limit would be enough. But it was not strongy rejected either, and is still considered an option.

As a drawback of the current hardware limit it was mentioned that the ability of using clusters is a major innovation of computer Chess, which would be suppressed by not awarding this effort in the WCCC. To circumvent this problem I suggested that we could limit the hadware to clusters of 4 nodes of 4 cores each. But this idea met with little approval. On the other side of this issue it was pointed out that allowing unlmited cluster size would detract effort from programmers to cluster programming, while there time would have been better spent by improving the single-CPU performance of their engine. Most ordinary users would not benefit from better scaling of a custer engine at all.

At some point it was mentioned that it was doubtful if Rybka would participate next year if the 8-core limit remained in force. That was enough to sway al other participants in favor of the limit!

I am not sure why you think a name change would be required, or what the extra M stands for. A cluster is not a computer, and a championhip for Humans usually does not allow the participation of teams, rather than individuals.

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto]

The most common argument of proponents for limited hardware was to not scare away amateurs from the tournament. It is not likely that more than two or three participants could afford clusters of 1000+ CPUs, and it is clear that a tournament with only two or three participants will not be viable.

What is the problem if not all participants can afford the same hardware? Not all participants can afford to take more than a week off or pay the fee to travel to remote locations, either. Not all participants can afford to work as full time professionals on their engine so they have a chance of catching up with Rybka. Not all amateurs can afford the have a semi-professional opening book team preparing book kills. Not all amateurs have the same programming skills.

Why arbitrarily focus on the hardware?

The delusion that limiting the hardware will improve participation has already been disproven this year, by equally the record of lowest participants ever, despite being in a not too remote location with a high interest in chess. Given that it was already proven wrong, why keep repeating such a verifiable false assertion? Do you think that keeping to repeat this will suddenly make it true?

Why not focus on the real reason: the length and costs of participating in this tournament do not match up with the attention that can be expected from it.

For commercial programs, playing on large clusters is not very attractve, as their main customer base does not have such clusters.

So, the rules are there to protect commercial interests?

So it was coined that if a limit is to be imposed, at the current level of technology a quad would be a more logical choice than an octal. Quads are more or less standard now, in the consumer market.

This is the one thing I agree with, and have pointed out several times before the tournament. Not that anybody listened, anyway...

On the other side of this issue it was pointed out that allowing unlmited cluster size would detract effort from programmers to cluster programming, while there time would have been better spent by improving the single-CPU performance of their engine. Most ordinary users would not benefit from better scaling of a custer engine at all.

You can't know this, unless you can predict the future. You think the future is 4 or 8 cores? With 800-core chips already on the market? Do you think the future is shared memory multiprocessing? With memory already being a bottleneck?

I am not sure why you think a name change would be required, or what the extra M stands for. A cluster is not a computer, and a championhip for Humans usually does not allow the participation of teams, rather than individuals.

A cluster is just a kind of multi-core system with the components in seperate physical cases, and a fairly slow interconnect. By the same reasoning, you should reject anything with more than 1 core, because those CPUs are teaming up to produce the best move. Or maybe all superscalar CPUs. Those darned execution units collaborating...

[Spock]

Well, I think two separate tournaments had the potential to be a good compromise for everyone. But as I said in my earlier post, the hardware limited section still had hugely expensive hardware (the W5580s) as well as a huge hardware differential. The exact same concerns that were supposed to have been addressed by the hardware limit but clearly weren't. So it wasn't thought through properly. I still think two separate ones has the potential to keep everyone happy, but the hardware limited one should be equal hardware (perhaps someone like Dell or HP may be prepared to loan some identical quad boxes) or a lower affordable hardware limit such as quads. Of course as technology progresses it would need to be reviewed. And the overly aggressive competitive attitudes from some commercial team representatives needs to be toned down, in my opinion.

[Edsel Apostol]

Based on the discussions, in my opinion, I think that they should retain the current setup where there is a WCCC and an Olympiad so as to satisfy both sides.

Maybe WCCC would have different categories like:

Uniform Hardware
No Hardware Limit

Uniform Hardware would make sure that other teams would not have an unfair advantage of having much faster and expensive machine just like what happened in the recent WCCC where other teams used inferior hardware. The hardware to be used must be the most common hardware used by ordinary people.

No Hardware Limit would showcase the combination of both hardware and software innovations.

If I can afford the expenses I will try to join WCCC next year with my amateur engine.