CCT replaces ICGA's event for the World Championship?

[IanO]

Given the prevailing opinion that a hardware-restricted ICGA event no longer represents a real World Championship, which event should take over that prestigious title? The ICGA's own suggestion is an open Computer Olympiad event, but many people are suggesting an internet tournament such as the CCT. (CCT 1-6 is documented here.)

In pursuit of this, what safeguards would we need to add to the CCT in order to avoid cheating and such? How would we promote the event so that the rest of the world is clued in to its importance and so the world press would cover the event appropriately? Are there any other hurdles to overcome to transfer the title? What could be done to "sweeten the pot" so that all reasonable championship candidates would attend? (For instance, what was wrong with the WCCC that kept Fritz and Hiarcs away for so many years? How come Shredder and Fritz haven't competed in the CCT events? And how come we have not seen supercomputer participants like Hydra recently?)

Ian

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

The whole situation with the world computer championchip is a big mess and I don't think that the dust will sattele down in the near future

[mhull]

Given the prevailing opinion that a hardware-restricted ICGA event no longer represents a real World Championship, which event should take over that prestigious title? The ICGA's own suggestion is an open Computer Olympiad event, but many people are suggesting an internet tournament such as the CCT. (CCT 1-6 is documented here.)

In pursuit of this, what safeguards would we need to add to the CCT in order to avoid cheating and such? How would we promote the event so that the rest of the world is clued in to its importance and so the world press would cover the event appropriately? Are there any other hurdles to overcome to transfer the title? What could be done to "sweeten the pot" so that all reasonable championship candidates would attend? (For instance, what was wrong with the WCCC that kept Fritz and Hiarcs away for so many years? How come Shredder and Fritz haven't competed in the CCT events? And how come we have not seen supercomputer participants like Hydra recently?)

Ian

A CCT win is just as good (or better) than a world champion title, the "title" being mostly superfluous. The title itself just invites cheating, like any prize with marketing value. It's probably best to forget about titles and just enjoy the CCT competition.

IMHO, as soon as you give it marketing value, then the same corruption of that infected ICCA will start eating away at the new order.

[bob]

Given the prevailing opinion that a hardware-restricted ICGA event no longer represents a real World Championship, which event should take over that prestigious title? The ICGA's own suggestion is an open Computer Olympiad event, but many people are suggesting an internet tournament such as the CCT. (CCT 1-6 is documented here.)

In pursuit of this, what safeguards would we need to add to the CCT in order to avoid cheating and such? How would we promote the event so that the rest of the world is clued in to its importance and so the world press would cover the event appropriately? Are there any other hurdles to overcome to transfer the title? What could be done to "sweeten the pot" so that all reasonable championship candidates would attend? (For instance, what was wrong with the WCCC that kept Fritz and Hiarcs away for so many years? How come Shredder and Fritz haven't competed in the CCT events? And how come we have not seen supercomputer participants like Hydra recently?)

Ian

Some cheating would be very difficult to prevent. The "move now" key for example. But the GUI approach to playing on a server in a fully-automated manner eliminates much of the headache and hassle found in current ICGA tournaments. So even though an ICC event is not fool-proof with regards to cheating opportunities, it is at least far better than the manual operator (dark ages) approach the ICGA has used since 1974.

What keeps programs away (commercial programs) is the threat of losing. For example, when the WCCC was every 3 years, if a commercial program won one of those, it would _never_ play in the succeeding ACM computer chess tournaments, because it was already "world computer chess champion" and losing in an ACM event would give competitors an edge in advertising when they could claim that they had beaten the current WCCC program. Another issue with commercials is that many would rather sit back and tell you how good they are, rather than coming forward to attempt to show you and stumble, particularly since there are plenty of strong amateur programs to deal with besides the usual commercial program entrants.

It's all about marketing advantage, nothing more.

[michiguel]

Given the prevailing opinion that a hardware-restricted ICGA event no longer represents a real World Championship, which event should take over that prestigious title? The ICGA's own suggestion is an open Computer Olympiad event, but many people are suggesting an internet tournament such as the CCT. (CCT 1-6 is documented here.)

In pursuit of this, what safeguards would we need to add to the CCT in order to avoid cheating and such? How would we promote the event so that the rest of the world is clued in to its importance and so the world press would cover the event appropriately? Are there any other hurdles to overcome to transfer the title? What could be done to "sweeten the pot" so that all reasonable championship candidates would attend? (For instance, what was wrong with the WCCC that kept Fritz and Hiarcs away for so many years? How come Shredder and Fritz haven't competed in the CCT events? And how come we have not seen supercomputer participants like Hydra recently?)

Ian

We could found a World Chess Programmer Association and have our own championship.

Miguel

[Kirill Kryukov]

Given the prevailing opinion that a hardware-restricted ICGA event no longer represents a real World Championship, which event should take over that prestigious title? The ICGA's own suggestion is an open Computer Olympiad event, but many people are suggesting an internet tournament such as the CCT. (CCT 1-6 is documented here.)

In pursuit of this, what safeguards would we need to add to the CCT in order to avoid cheating and such? How would we promote the event so that the rest of the world is clued in to its importance and so the world press would cover the event appropriately? Are there any other hurdles to overcome to transfer the title? What could be done to "sweeten the pot" so that all reasonable championship candidates would attend? (For instance, what was wrong with the WCCC that kept Fritz and Hiarcs away for so many years? How come Shredder and Fritz haven't competed in the CCT events? And how come we have not seen supercomputer participants like Hydra recently?)

Ian

The only priority of a commercial author is (in general) to maximize the profit. So a commercial author will do only what makes commercial sense. This is the point that computer chess community often fails to understand, when talking about finding out the strongest program through a tournament.

Any event designed to "find out who is the strongest" won't acomplish this goal by definition. Commercial authors can weight their chances in advance, they will participate only when the "chance of winning" x "benefit that can be gained from winning" outweights the "chance of not winning" x "bad publicity that will result from not winning".

Even before Rybka, when the field was more even, there were enough many programs to make the "chance of not winning" high even for a strong program. So if anything, one can be surprised that so many commercial programs attended the past events. (Which indicates that some commercial programmers are not solely guided by the commercial common sense. Also that in the past years the marked had place for more than just the strongest program.)

The only way to actually determine the strongest program is to arrange an independent testing, which includes only publicly available programs, tested without asking the authors permission. But I won't go into detail because we are discussing a tournament here. Tournaments are for fun and communication rather than for discovering the strongest program. (Which many people don't realize, but I hope that you do).

For instance, what was wrong with the WCCC that kept Fritz and Hiarcs away for so many years?

Nothing was wrong, other than the attending probably would not increase the Fritz and Hiarcs profits. I guarantee you that if Fritz author's permission was required for Fritz being listed in CCRL (for example), the author would not give such permission.

Best,
Kirill

[Thomas Mayer]

Given the prevailing opinion that a hardware-restricted ICGA event no longer represents a real World Championship, which event should take over that prestigious title? The ICGA's own suggestion is an open Computer Olympiad event, but many people are suggesting an internet tournament such as the CCT. (CCT 1-6 is documented here.)

In pursuit of this, what safeguards would we need to add to the CCT in order to avoid cheating and such? How would we promote the event so that the rest of the world is clued in to its importance and so the world press would cover the event appropriately? Are there any other hurdles to overcome to transfer the title? What could be done to "sweeten the pot" so that all reasonable championship candidates would attend? (For instance, what was wrong with the WCCC that kept Fritz and Hiarcs away for so many years? How come Shredder and Fritz haven't competed in the CCT events? And how come we have not seen supercomputer participants like Hydra recently?)

Ian

We could found a World Chess Programmer Association and have our own championship.

Miguel

with maybe the same problems. I mean the ICGA isn't as bad as everybody says here. It can't be the solution to exchange one organization by another one. If you want to change how things are handled just get member and start to change things, this is doable like in every organization, but somebody MUST do it. You want a WCCC in north- or south america ? Help to find a sponsor who wants to hold it. The ICGA is trying to listen to it's member but then the members must say what they want - and not in CCC because Levy etc. don't read here.

Greets, Thomas

[Rémi Coulom]

I guarantee you that if Fritz author's permission was required for Fritz being listed in CCRL (for example), the author would not give such permission.

This is extremely insulting to Frans. If you knew him, you would not write this.

Rémi

[Rémi Coulom]

with maybe the same problems. I mean the ICGA isn't as bad as everybody says here. It can't be the solution to exchange one organization by another one. If you want to change how things are handled just get member and start to change things, this is doable like in every organization, but somebody MUST do it. You want a WCCC in north- or south america ? Help to find a sponsor who wants to hold it. The ICGA is trying to listen to it's member but then the members must say what they want - and not in CCC because Levy etc. don't read here.

Greets, Thomas

I agree completely with Thomas.

The ICGA is not a dictatorship. The leaders of the ICGA are elected by members of the association. If the majority of programmers want a change in the leaders of the ICGA, they can enter the association and campaign for another president.

Nobody wants to become president of the association because it is a lot of work. David may make big blunders from time to time, but he is doing his best to find sponsors and improve the WCCC.

A big problem is that the current leaders of the association often lack vision, and are disconnected from programmers. This is not new. In 1997, the ICGA created the position of programmers representative in order to improve this. I have the feeling that in the past, programmers should have used that representative position a lot more in order to influence the way the ICGA is run.

I believe the main problem is that general interest in computer chess is decaying everywhere. That is because programs are too strong. Nobody will change this. All other big real-life tournament are decaying or dead. The good old times will not come back.

The WCCC has survived so far thanks to the change from ICCA to ICGA, the Computer Olympiad, and the conference. The Computer Olympiad was once a minor side event of the WCCC. Now, it is the reverse. It was obvious during the Amsterdam events of 2007. There were more Go programmers than chess programmers in Amsterdam. Some Go programmers came from Japan, Taiwan, and the US. The chess tournament only had operators and local programmers.

I am sure that the WCCC can continue to exist for a few years if the organizers scale their ambitions down, in terms of length of the event, and amount of money asked to sponsors.

Internet tournaments are very nice and convenient. But they cannot be compared to real-life tournaments, really.

Rémi

[Kirill Kryukov]

I guarantee you that if Fritz author's permission was required for Fritz being listed in CCRL (for example), the author would not give such permission.

This is extremely insulting to Frans. If you knew him, you would not write this.

Rémi

I don't think it's insulting, and I am ready to apologize in case if I am wrong. Also I certainly can't blame him or anyone else. It's just the way it is. Commercial authors have to feed their families like everyone else.

By the way, Fritz is one of the commercial engines that has a freeware version available (apart from Naum, Ruffian, Smarthink, Ktulu, List, Sjeng). Many other commercial engines don't have a freeware version (known to me) (like Hiarcs, Junior, Shredder, Tiger, Nimzo, The King, etc). So Fritz is better than many in this regard, thanks to Frans. (Fritz 5.32 is currently a free single-CPU engine #30 in my tournament)

Best regards,
Kirill