Future World Computer Chess Championships

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Harvey Williamson
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Future World Computer Chess Championships

Post by Harvey Williamson »

All authors who have competed in the last 5 years are currently being polled. There are basically 3 options that they have to vote for - they get 3 votes a 1st 2nd and 3rd choice.

the 3 options are in summary:

1. An adjustable upper limit to be regularly reviewed

2. Uniform hardware

3. Anything goes and the arms race continues.

The result of this ballot will I think have effects on other tournaments like Leiden.
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turbojuice1122
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Post by turbojuice1122 »

Is choice three actually worded like that in the actual poll? If so, I think it would be a biased poll.
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Eelco de Groot
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Post by Eelco de Groot »

turbojuice1122 wrote:Is choice three actually worded like that in the actual poll? If so, I think it would be a biased poll.
You got that right. But I trust David Levy would not have put it like that. But never mind how Harvey is wording it, I kind of doubt that the IGCA is capable of coming to any good decision. I'm with prof. Hyatt on this one. I think it is telling that people who participated in Beijing with a chessprogram for a mobile phone have a right to vote and programmers like Robert, who have an issue with the way things are organized in the IGCA and therefore have not participated in recent years, are not heard. A biased poll indeed.

Regards, Eelco
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Post by Harvey Williamson »

Eelco de Groot wrote:
turbojuice1122 wrote:Is choice three actually worded like that in the actual poll? If so, I think it would be a biased poll.
You got that right. But I trust David Levy would not have put it like that. But never mind how Harvey is wording it, I kind of doubt that the IGCA is capable of coming to any good decision. I'm with prof. Hyatt on this one. I think it is telling that people who participated in Beijing with a chessprogram for a mobile phone have a right to vote and programmers like Robert, who have an issue with the way things are organized in the IGCA and therefore have not participated in recent years, are not heard. A biased poll indeed.

Regards, Eelco
So wording aside - which of course as I said in the opening post was just a summary - why is going back 5 years biased?
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Post by Harvey Williamson »

Eelco de Groot wrote:
turbojuice1122 wrote:Is choice three actually worded like that in the actual poll? If so, I think it would be a biased poll.
You got that right. But I trust David Levy would not have put it like that. But never mind how Harvey is wording it, I kind of doubt that the IGCA is capable of coming to any good decision. I'm with prof. Hyatt on this one. I think it is telling that people who participated in Beijing with a chessprogram for a mobile phone have a right to vote and programmers like Robert, who have an issue with the way things are organized in the IGCA and therefore have not participated in recent years, are not heard. A biased poll indeed.

Regards, Eelco
So wording aside - which of course as I said in the opening post was just a summary - why is going back 5 years biased?
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Post by Eelco de Groot »

Harvey Williamson wrote:
Eelco de Groot wrote:
turbojuice1122 wrote:Is choice three actually worded like that in the actual poll? If so, I think it would be a biased poll.
You got that right. But I trust David Levy would not have put it like that. But never mind how Harvey is wording it, I kind of doubt that the IGCA is capable of coming to any good decision. I'm with prof. Hyatt on this one. I think it is telling that people who participated in Beijing with a chessprogram for a mobile phone have a right to vote and programmers like Robert, who have an issue with the way things are organized in the IGCA and therefore have not participated in recent years, are not heard. A biased poll indeed.

Regards, Eelco
So wording aside - which of course as I said in the opening post was just a summary - why is going back 5 years biased?
Hello Harvey!

As you know, in a poll, you are not supposed to influence the outcome with the way the questions are phrased. If this was supposed to be a fair summary of the way things were asked you might as well not bother to ask anyone's opinion, but I am sure these were just your words to describe the way you see it.

What I mean, in a broader sense, is that I think the value of the WCCC as a World Computer Chess Championship is undermined by the the fact that there is so little participation from any academic teams in recent years. This is not entirely to blame on the IGCA but also for instance by the fact that computer chess is not commercially such a big business anymore with the demise of dedicated unit manufacturers. The IGCA had to find other ways of sponsoring to organize their rather expensive tournament. It is kind of a miracle that they managed to do that, and I congratulate them with that! Somewhere along the way computer chess as a field of computer science also suffered from this demise in commercial chess computers, but the ICCA could have done more in trying to adapt to the new situation instead of year in year out doing things the way they used to do it in the golden years of computer chess, that probably ended with the defeat of Kasparov by IBM. Another factor, IBM did not really care what happened after that defeat of the human World Champion as long as they could financially capitalize on this one event, they made sure it could only go downhill by immediately dismantling Deep Blue's hardware. They turned computer chess into a circus for their own products and we still haven't recovered.

But getting back to the ICGA, I just wish they would listen more to the people who are still academically interested in computerchess, I feel that they don't do that enough. Robert Hyatt is just one of them but many others have not really been active since more than these five years. This is only partly related to the way ICGA has operated in these years but after all this was supposed to be an academic organization, originally.

Coming back to today and the three choices in the poll, why for instance is there no fourth option to keep organizing a separate event for unlimited hardware as in Pamplona this year? You could also just keep it in one tournament with two separate prizes for two, or more, categories but I understand not everybody might be happy with that and just don't want to play against mainframes or clusters.

From a computer science viewpoint the cluster tournament - no mainframes these past years as I believe these turned more and more to floating point specialists, but maybe Robert could explain this for us- I believe in the WCCC is by far the more interesting one, and from this same computer science oriented viewpoint it makes absolutely no sense to limit the hardware for participants because customers of commercial programs are not yet ready for it. But this computer science viewpoint is largely ignored, that's what I meant with 'biased'.

Okay Harvey, that was more or less my biased summary then of where we stand today :), I try to keep it short as I'm no WCCC participant or anything and would not be able to build a cluster yet either...

World Cluster Chess Circus regards,

Eelco
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Post by Steve B »

Eelco de Groot wrote:

What I mean, in a broader sense, is that I think the value of the WCCC as a World Computer Chess Championship is undermined by the the fact that there is so little participation from any academic teams in recent years. This is not entirely to blame on the IGCA but also for instance by the fact that computer chess is not commercially such a big business anymore with the demise of dedicated unit manufacturers. The IGCA had to find other ways of sponsoring to organize their rather expensive tournament.
Actually i think your analysis of the impact of dedicated chess computers on the evolution of the WCCC is excellent Eelco
good that you mentioned it because some of the younger aficionados of our hobby could use a good history lesson from time to time
Well Done

as far as Hyatt being able to vote
i think that bit of confusion has been resolved as Crafty has been shown to have participated in the WCCC during the last 5 years so he does get a vote

Regards From the Elders Council..History Sub-Committee
Steve
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