crem wrote: ↑Wed Aug 14, 2019 6:37 pmOk, it's a balance between desire to go there and amount of hassle.
Indeed if we
really wanted to go there, we could free up time from work, we would prepare visas etc. But it's just too much hassle, and too tiring (22 hours in a plane one way, then 3 days there and then 22 hours back) -- just not worth it.
You must be very unfavorably located. For me flight time was only 11 hours, and for half the planet it would be less. There must be Leela developers that live closer by?
Probably you are holder of one of the lucky
citizenships which don't need a visa to China.
Actually I don't need visa too, but other reasons (vacation and too long flight) outweight.
Macao is not the people's republic; it has different rules, and there are border posts between it and the people's republic. U.S. or E.U. citizens don't need visa. That it takes long is a valid concern, but that some concerns are valid doesn't alter that the fact that the visa argument was nonsense.
We
did announce it and called for volunteers in Lc0 discord, noone responded.
I did not see any announcement in TalkChess, where all the people are. "LC discord" (first time I hear about it!) I cannot even read without registering...
Furthermore, a WCCC participant told me yesterday, when we were discussing the non-participation of Leela, that someone actually did respond positively to the request. He seemed completely ignored.
Probably, but it requires time and effort which could otherwise be spent to Lc0 development.
Again, just posting it here would probably be enough. There are always people that know people, etc.
Last year we lost of time in tablebase draw because of inexperienced operator.
For me personally it would also be a problem. I can misplace bishop on long moves, things like finding square "g6" while looking from black's perspective also takes like 5 seconds for me, and under stress it could be even more.
So a need of qualified operator is actually a lesson from the last year (also someone from Komodo team said that WCCC is not a chess engine championship but a championship of a team engine+operator, and they seem to be right).
Yeah, where did you dug up him? My wife would have done better. Tessa Pijl (Richard's then 12-year-old daughter) used to do better... You should realize that the description '
inexperienced operator' was a (rather gross)
euphemism, which took hold because a more accurate description of the situation was considered unfit for printing. To perform like this a lot more than just inexperience is needed. 'Inexperience' only means you have never done it before; not necessarily that you are incompetent for doing it. Sorry for being so blunt about it, but political correctnes gets to be very counterproductive if it creates misunderstandings that finally result in non-participation. For one, 5 sec is not a problem at all. I always allow 10 sec of operator time for myself (5 for entering and 5 for executing), and I am really slow as operators go. That still only takes a minor fraction of the time you have. (And for most of that time the engine would actually be pondering on the right move.) You should of course take account of the expected operator time in the initial time you set for the program, and take care to keep the computer's clock in sync with the official match clock if a discrepancy occurs because of an unexpectedly long game. But 5 minutes of instruction by someone who has done it before should be enough to learn that. Secondly, you never have to "find anything like square g6". You don't
read the moves, you look at an image of the board on your monitor, which shows you a big fat arrow for the move that was made, after the computer beeps to alert you that one was made, and you just move the piece on the match board like the image shows (e.g. "behind that Pawn", or "next to that Knight"). I am never 'coordinate conscious' at all; it is not needed. Finally, if it takes longer under stress, you'd better enter the moves at your leasure.
All in all, we wanted to go there, but not wanted hard enough to be ready dealing with all the hassle.
Not wanting to go there is of course anyone's right. What I object to is gross exaggeration of the hassle to justify it.