Important announcement: World Computer Chess Championship –

[karger]

Seems like this tournament is not very well thought anymore and really is just not relevant because there are so many nearly equal engines available that are not going to be in it.

[Ferdy]

I am sure David Levy is open for ideas.

Is that a joke, or are you serious ?

He is an old donkey. No one can change his mind. He still thinks computer tournaments should be manually operated, today, in 2017. He obviously understands nothing about statistics either, give the "all play all" format of the tournament. Doesn't want to make it a fair competition, by forcing all engines to use the same hardware, same book, same TB.

Then he doesn't understand why no one joins his "world championship"…

This new donkey is abusing the old donkey after learning the tricks of the old donkey .

[hgm]

Doesn't want to make it a fair competition, by forcing all engines to use the same hardware, same book, same TB.

You forget to mention evaluation. It is also highly unfair that some participants have better evaluation then others. They really should be forced to use the same DLL for evaluation, to make for a fair tournament.

[Uri Blass]

Doesn't want to make it a fair competition, by forcing all engines to use the same hardware, same book, same TB.

You forget to mention evaluation. It is also highly unfair that some participants have better evaluation then others. They really should be forced to use the same DLL for evaluation, to make for a fair tournament.

Why stop at evaluation?
It is unfair that some programs are better for different reasons.
They should all use exactly the same software so we have a fair competition.

Hopefully all get 50% and every participant wins the world championship and is happy.

[Henk]

Or some programmers having more talent than others. Or some people even have no money to buy a computer.

It would be best only to participate on bingo tournaments where all participants have the same chance of winning.

[hgm]

So all participants must play the same moves in all positions. And then the size of the program will be used as a tie breaker!

It isn't really a true World Championship is the participants are allowed to use different algorithms to calculate the moves. Some algorithms produce better moves than others, and that would be highly unfair.

[Henk]

It still may be possible when using same hardware and software that some have hardware failure. So better use same machine.

And when one person gets ill he gets a substitute.

[Rebel]

Then he doesn't understand why no one joins his "world championship"…

Well, adding a zero to the 2,000 Euro will certainly help, adding 2 will cause an overloaded inbox.

[Ras]

Maybe there's another problem with the travel in general. International air travel in particular has become nasty due to security lockdowns. It is only getting worse over time, see the current ideas to ban laptops (and have them stolen from or damaged in checked baggage).

The event is located in the Netherlands. This means that getting things like visa permits in place is easiest for participants from the Schengen Area (they don't need any), more difficult from other Western countries and a lot of hassle for the rest of the world.

While this is not the fault of the ICGA, the result still is that participants will experience discrimination by country.

The whole event in itself is totally out of touch with 2017. We have things like video meetings. VR and telemetric surgery are right around the corner - and people have to travel for entering chess moves into a computer? This is totally backwards. The participants could just submit their engines and maybe join via Skype.

An engine tournament is not a human tournament, and mimicking human championships even more via the 2018 format makes even less sense.

In the same way, modern engine contests are not via a small number of games. In fact, this doesn't even make sense for humans, but that's because of human limitations engines don't have. Humans cannot play some thousand games a day or so.

That the WCCC still is using such small numbers makes the event even more irrelevant. The outcome is more or less like taking the strongest engines and throwing dice.

The only actual value I can see is for commercial engines. A by and large meaningless title still can be used for marketing.

[Sean Evans]

http://en.chessbase.com/post/computer-c ... new-format

Another reason programs do not want to play is many programs are derivatives and know they will be caught like Rybka was caught cheating!

Speaking of derivatives is Andscacs participating in the tourney? If not, why not?!

Sean

Again just your imagination.

Then enter the program!