hgm wrote:The point is that wthout the limit, one other program could also have used more cores. But not the others. So it would in effct have become a single-game tournament And the chances for Rybka to win that single game would be lower than the hances it would end ahead of the others in a gauntlet of many games. That is just a matter of reduced standard deviation in the larger umer of games.
I can't see any merit in Ray's argument. How would it help to "show your skills" if you ended only second? Whatever targets the Rybka team could have had in mind for this tournament, they were all subsidiary to winning it. o I don't think that any rue increasing that probability can be called a 'handicap'.
I don't follow. GCP's program will run on more than 8 cores. Diep can use more than 8 cores. I've run on a quad-socket box with 32 cores (prototype). What the reasoning behind the decisions was has never been explained. It was something that was just suddenly "the way it is" with no discussion or alternate ideas considered.
Clearly someone thought it was in their best interest to sneak this rule in. Who that "someone" was has never been explicitly revealed so far as I know. But there was someone that benefitted. I'd suspect that any program that could effectively use more than 8 cores was penalized, which clearly means that any program that could not use more than 8 effectively was a beneficiary of this sudden rule change.
The rule was an idea of David Levy. Something I inadvertantly wrote in this forum might have inspired him to do it.
Your final conclusion is not sound.
Diep was not there.
You were not there.
Deep Sjeng and Rybka where the only engines using more than 8 cores in the unlimited event.
Given the list of participants, and their ratings, Rybka had a larger probability to win the WCCC than it would have had when just the two of them would have been playing on 48 and 56 cores, respectively. This at the expense of Deep Sjeng.
So I could imagine that Deep Sjeng was penalized by the rule. But Rybka only benefited from it.
hgm wrote:The rule was an idea of David Levy. Something I inadvertantly wrote in this forum might have inspired him to do it.
Your final conclusion is not sound.
Diep was not there.
You were not there.
Deep Sjeng and Rybka where the only engines using more than 8 cores in the unlimited event.
Given the list of participants, and their ratings, Rybka had a larger probability to win the WCCC than it would have had when just the two of them would have been playing on 48 and 56 cores, respectively. This at the expense of Deep Sjeng.
So I could imagine that Deep Sjeng was penalized by the rule. But Rybka only benefited from it.
Not enough data for me to decide which program would have gained the most by having more cores. I'll have to let that pass as "unknown".
As far as participation, however, when the rule was made, the tournament participants were not fixed. So there is no way to measure the effect this rule had, it might have helped, or it might have hurt. But it certainly didn't do anything but _hurt_ the reputation of the event itself. And made a significant change to an event that had been using the _same_ rules from 1974 until this ill-advised rule change at the last minute in 2009.
