Your arguments are correct, but continuing with your bicycle example... lets say you invite top 10 or 20 best riders of the planet and instead of a "few laps around the block" you make a fair competition with a challenge circuit and unbiased rules where all have chances to win. The winner of such event will fill as the best. It will be a "world champion" besides its official or not.hgm wrote:Actually this is almost universally not true. The way it works in real life is that people who engage in a certain competative activity organize themselves into an official representative body, and delegate the right to organize a World Championship exclusively to that body.Modern Times wrote:Any organisation can run a World Championship, and the winner can claim that title. The ICGA is one example.
So yes, I could jump on my bicycle, ride a few laps around the block, and then call myself "World Champion cycling". (Or "God of the Wheels", or whatever. There are no limits to how I could call myself.)
But I would be lying. Everyone would know that, and at best would think I was a pompous idiot.
Only one organization can award the title World Championship cycling, and that is the UCI. Because cyclist have agreed that the UCI is their representative body.
In Chess the globally representative body is FIDE. For a Chess title to be more than just a 'Mickey-Mouse title' it must be endorsed by FIDE. The largest (if not the only) organization of Chess-program authors is ICGA, and it is associated with FIDE. So they have the monopoly of awarding World-Championship titles in computer Chess.
The Komodo people are simply lying, for obvious commercial benefits.
Those are the facts. It is rather disappointing that the Komodo team resorts to such cheap methods for financial gain. If they think they deserve the title, the honorable way would be to compete for it. If I were the organizer of TCEC, I would consider this claim sufficient reason to ban Komodo from further participation, as they are obviously abusing the privilage of having been allowed to participate.
As opposite, lets say the "official organization" makes a competition with few competitors, few laps. The winner will be acclaimed the "official WCCC", still people will know something is rotten in Amsterdam ( ). And the winner will know he really is not the best.
So its a lot of talk on what IS a world champion, what it means, what it really is, etc...
More easy will be to call competitions based on FIDE event category, as in human tournaments. This is hard to define in computer chess because Elo scales are relative.
Still we can judge the quality of the tournament by the participant list, the rules, amount of games, etc.. and conclude if "for us" the winner deserves to be designed a world champion.
nTCEC clear is one of the best tournaments to filter a WCCC. Witch does not means is the top engine. (same as with humans before Carlsen title).
Regards,
Ignacio.