Junior is World Computer Chess Champion!

[lucasart]

Junior is funny tournament winner not world champion. The world championship without Houdini is only non-sense tournament.

You seem to be a bit out of touch with reality. In real life you become World Champion by winning the World Championship. There is no other way. You cannot become World Champion if you are not willing to participate in the World Championship, for whatever reason. Not even if it is because your chances of actually winning are not high enough to your taste...

If you do not participate, you are in fact the ultimate loser. Whining about it afterwards, that despite not participating, you are World Champion anyway, and that the event is not valid without your presence, is beyond childish...

Quite the reverse: ICGA is out of touch with reality. These people live in the stoneage! Today we have computer networks. Why play OTB tournaments ?

* it's a hardware race, instead of a software one. some people come with cluster monsters, and some with a simple laptop. also, not everyone has the means to fly to Yokohama and stay in a hotel for a week, and potentially buy expensive hardware. And some people do, but they really don't care enough to do it (like me for example).

* operating manually is just stupid: sometimes game is lost because operator played a wrong move (while comp move was correct), also it introduces a time lag. besides, it's a huge waste of time, and means that human operators have to sit there for hours.

* consequently to the above 2 points: the only right way to operate engine is to run them on the same machine (to avoid hardware competition) and to do that in an automated way (ie. with a GUI or CLI). This is what rating lists do. The only world championship that makes any sense is a serious rating list (like CEGT or CCRL).

As a result, all authors of top engines simply don't care about this ridiculous tournament that calls itself "World Championship". It is simply not a World Championship, because there is no serious competitor.

Following your logic, I could invent my own tournament and call it a world championship, and impose that people have to come to my place ion Hong Kong to play it OTB. Of course, no one would care, and no one would come, and I would call myself World Champion, and that would rank me higher than Carlsen and Anand by that logic.

[Gerd Isenberg]

Junior is funny tournament winner not world champion. The world championship without Houdini is only non-sense tournament.

You seem to be a bit out of touch with reality. In real life you become World Champion by winning the World Championship. There is no other way. You cannot become World Champion if you are not willing to participate in the World Championship, for whatever reason. Not even if it is because your chances of actually winning are not high enough to your taste...

If you do not participate, you are in fact the ultimate loser. Whining about it afterwards, that despite not participating, you are World Champion anyway, and that the event is not valid without your presence, is beyond childish...

Quite the reverse: ICGA is out of touch with reality. These people live in the stoneage! Today we have computer networks. Why play OTB tournaments ?

* it's a hardware race, instead of a software one. some people come with cluster monsters, and some with a simple laptop. also, not everyone has the means to fly to Yokohama and stay in a hotel for a week, and potentially buy expensive hardware. And some people do, but they really don't care enough to do it (like me for example).

* operating manually is just stupid: sometimes game is lost because operator played a wrong move (while comp move was correct), also it introduces a time lag. besides, it's a huge waste of time, and means that human operators have to sit there for hours.

* consequently to the above 2 points: the only right way to operate engine is to run them on the same machine (to avoid hardware competition) and to do that in an automated way (ie. with a GUI or CLI). This is what rating lists do. The only world championship that makes any sense is a serious rating list (like CEGT or CCRL).

As a result, all authors of top engines simply don't care about this ridiculous tournament that calls itself "World Championship". It is simply not a World Championship, because there is no serious competitor.

Following your logic, I could invent my own tournament and call it a world championship, and impose that people have to come to my place ion Hong Kong to play it OTB. Of course, no one would care, and no one would come, and I would call myself World Champion, and that would rank me higher than Carlsen and Anand by that logic.

Nonsense. This is the one and only World Computer Chess Championship. Playing over the board with open hardware - the best you have, and tradition since 1974! Organized by the ICCA/ICGA since 1977.

[Modern Times]

It also has no participants that run on 2400 cores.

But I think the most important thing that is overlooked here, is that this is not a competition for engines, but for authors.

Sure - I like to see that, dozens of cores, hundreds of cores, and again I agree that the event seems to be for authors, but it doesn't make it a World Championship.

It is the equal hardware event that is totally useless. There are many equal hardware ratings lists around that have ALL the engines, and hundreds of games per engine. They are far more meaningful.

[lucasart]

Junior is funny tournament winner not world champion. The world championship without Houdini is only non-sense tournament.

You seem to be a bit out of touch with reality. In real life you become World Champion by winning the World Championship. There is no other way. You cannot become World Champion if you are not willing to participate in the World Championship, for whatever reason. Not even if it is because your chances of actually winning are not high enough to your taste...

If you do not participate, you are in fact the ultimate loser. Whining about it afterwards, that despite not participating, you are World Champion anyway, and that the event is not valid without your presence, is beyond childish...

Quite the reverse: ICGA is out of touch with reality. These people live in the stoneage! Today we have computer networks. Why play OTB tournaments ?

* it's a hardware race, instead of a software one. some people come with cluster monsters, and some with a simple laptop. also, not everyone has the means to fly to Yokohama and stay in a hotel for a week, and potentially buy expensive hardware. And some people do, but they really don't care enough to do it (like me for example).

* operating manually is just stupid: sometimes game is lost because operator played a wrong move (while comp move was correct), also it introduces a time lag. besides, it's a huge waste of time, and means that human operators have to sit there for hours.

* consequently to the above 2 points: the only right way to operate engine is to run them on the same machine (to avoid hardware competition) and to do that in an automated way (ie. with a GUI or CLI). This is what rating lists do. The only world championship that makes any sense is a serious rating list (like CEGT or CCRL).

As a result, all authors of top engines simply don't care about this ridiculous tournament that calls itself "World Championship". It is simply not a World Championship, because there is no serious competitor.

Following your logic, I could invent my own tournament and call it a world championship, and impose that people have to come to my place ion Hong Kong to play it OTB. Of course, no one would care, and no one would come, and I would call myself World Champion, and that would rank me higher than Carlsen and Anand by that logic.

Nonsense. This is the one and only World Computer Chess Championship. Playing over the board with open hardware - the best you have, and tradition since 1974! Organized by the ICCA/ICGA since 1977.

Exactly as I said: the stoneage

[kinderchocolate]

Lol, Lucas, with so much fun things to do in Hong Kong and the fact that a foreigner is more attractive to Hong Kong women.... You should go out and have fun! Don't need to debate a championship that you didn't participate! @__@

[lucasart]

Lol, Lucas, with so much fun things to do in Hong Kong and the fact that a foreigner is more attractive to Hong Kong women....

Unfortunately, I arrived here with a ring on my finger already... Had I known...

[overlord]

No. In reality you can´t become human world champion if you are rated 2400 ELO. Simply it is not possible. What would you tell about man world championship without all those super-GMs? Funny tournament...

[Albert Silver]

Now can any of the programs in that tournament play at a 3000 level?

Yawn

Against humans they are all 3000+ except Merlin. Dont forget Hiarcs on a pocket pc played in a GM tournament 2 years in a row in Argentina. It got 2 GM norms and a 2931 rating. This was in 2008/9

Agreed, and that was on yesteryear hardware. Mobile hardware has advanced so much in the last few years that you can expect even Hiarcs from that time to be at least 100-150 Elo stronger on a new quad-core smartphone.

[Albert Silver]

Now can any of the programs in that tournament play at a 3000 level?

Yawn

Against humans they are all 3000+ except Merlin. Dont forget Hiarcs on a pocket pc played in a GM tournament 2 years in a row in Argentina. It got 2 GM norms and a 2931 rating. This was in 2008/9

Maybe there are 3000+ but we have no evidence for it because
I believe that we do not have relevant games against humans to know.

Correct me if I am wrong but I believe that the games of the humans against pocket hiarcs did not change their rating and a draw against hiarcs could not help humans to achieve a GM norm or IM norm.

In this situation we cannot get a reliable performance.

I also think that even based on reliable performance we cannot get a reliable rating if the computer score 9.5 out of 10 because a player may perform better against relatively weak players so if you want to get a reliable performance of 3000 against humans then you need a tournament when all the opponent are above 2700 and have a motivation not to lose against the computer because an additional 1/2 point can give them better rating and also better money prize like the game against humans.

I could be wrong, but I seem to recall they had financial incentives to draw or win.

[Albert Silver]

Junior is funny tournament winner not world champion. The world championship without Houdini is only non-sense tournament.

Without Houdini, Rybka, Stockfish, Critter and many others.

They can't force people to attend, but they can certainly cease calling it something that it is not. So they should stop calling a world championship.

Ray, in your opinion what should the conditions be to call an ICGA championship a world championship? Please be specific, you can't decide it every time individually whether it qualifies or not.

Even if you can come up with some definition, imagine you travel to Yokohama, and at arriving they tell you that it is not going to be called a World Championship because a top engine withdrew its nomination in the last minute.

I concur with Gábor.

The ICGA has been conducting a tournament that was considered the "World Championship" by engine authors at its inception. At no point has there been any tournament that has supplanted the ICGA's tournament. Thus, the winner of the ICGA tournament should still be considered the "World Champion", regardless of which engines actually compete in it.

If some other tournament is established that has superior support from the engine authors, then it should be considered the "World Championship". At the moment, there is no such tournament.

CCT