You are mixing up cause and effect. ICGA events are less popular today for many reasons. Some history:jdart wrote:I continue to have a bad feeling about the result, if not the process.
One of ICGA's core problems now is that maybe once it was representative of the community of people who are hands-on engaged with computer chess. But that ceased to be true quite a long time ago. How many in this forum are members? Then, it is not surprising that their tournaments don't reflect the full spectrum of computer chess activity. (I am not talking here about the clones of questionable legality but all the activity and innovation that hundreds of programmers have done in the past 10 years). And now the recent investigation and banning have turned off some who might have participated.
--Jon
In the 70's, one had two ways to compete. ICGA WCCC and ACM events, or else playing in human tournaments (my programs have been members of USCF forever it seems).
Then computers got strong (1981 was a critical year, more in a second) and USCF event organizers were given the option of advertising with (NC) in USCF. (NC) meant, simply, "no computers allowed." One driving force behind this was my old program, Cray Blitz. Which had been invited to enter various tournaments for many years. Until 1981, when it jumped onto a Cray, and went to the Mississippi Closed Chess Championship and won the event with a perfect score. And created a sh**storm of protests. It wasn't a resident of Mississippi, the computer was in Minneapolis, etc. Never was raised previously. But that was a turning point. By 1985 or so, every tournament advertised in Chess Life was (NC).
Now we were down to just one way to compete, at the annual ACM events, or the WCCC events which were every 3 years back then. The last ACM event was held in 1994, just prior to the first Deep Blue vs Kasparov chess match. At that point in time, the ACM decided that computer chess was "near the end" of being solved, and stopped supporting the ACM tournaments. Now we were down to one event every 3 years.
At about that time, ICC (then ICS) came along and offered a way for everyone to compete online, no travel, and there were dozens of GM and IM players willing to play computers all day long. There was our "out". Play when we wanted, who we wanted, and we even started to organize online tournaments, some with humans and computers, some with just computers. At this point, the ACM events started to see a drop-off in attendance. ICS was cheaper (it was free at the time) and required no travel or time off from work.
The only thing holding the WCCC together at that point was the ICGA journal, and the (at that point) WCCC which had moved to an annual time schedule. There were still people that were developing new ideas and presenting them in the Journal. "derivative programmers" don't do that. So they have, for the most part, shunned WCCC events because (a) they did not want to share anything they had done; (b) they knew about rule 2, and sharing ideas would reveal they were using a derivative that would not be a legal participant.
So yes, participation has gone down. But primarily based on the cost of the event, the time required to play in the event, and the availablilty of online events at no cost, providing more opportunities to measure improvement than just once per year...
