Times They Are A Changing
David Levy
During the first three decades in the history of computer chess tournaments there developed a debate over the question: what hardware should the contestants be allowed to use? For a while there were even suggestions, prompted by Tony Marsland, of handicapping programs according to the power of their hardware. I was never in favour of the idea of handicapping because I have always felt that it would be impossible to achieve a fair way of managing the process. Furthermore, in 1981, at the ACM Computer Chess Championship in Los Angeles, a program called Philidor, developed by my team in London and running on a lowly Z80 processor in an Osborne 1 computer, finished in equal 5th-6th place (with Duchess), well ahead of Tony Marsland’s program AWIT, which ran on an all powerful Amdahl mainframe and which we defeated in our individual encounter. After that particular tournament the idea of handicapping lost whatever lustre it might have had.
When microcomputers emerged as suitable vehicles for chess programs, it became clear the very best microcomputer chess programs were absolutely no match for the strongest programs running on mainframes, with the result that separate microcomputer chess tournaments became popular, with the first World Microcomputer Chess Championship taking place in 1980. The top programs running on micros also often competed alongside their mainframe colleagues in “open” tournaments, and with good reason – they were usually able to give a reasonable account of themselves. Thus the world of computer chess witnessed two strands of regular competitions – those for microcomputers alone and those for everyone. There have also been tournaments organized for “uniform platforms”, taking the hardware element out of the competition altogether. For several years Don Beal hosted and organized such tournaments at Queen Mary College in London, but they did not meet with the same level of enthusiasm from the chess programming community.
It was not long after the defeat of Garry Kasparov by IBM’s Deep Blue that the strongest PC programs were winning just about all of the open computer chess tournaments. And so in 2002 the ICGA changed the rules for the World Computer Chess Championships, enveloping all programs in one tournament. From then on PC programs usually took the top honours in our tournaments. Some programmers have been content to enter our championships on single processor machines, others have strived to use dual or quad machines or even more cores. And we are now seeing PC programs that run on systems with tens of cores – the more the merrier.
The ICGA feels that the time has come to take stock of this trend of hunting for astronomic numbers of cores, and to bring matters back to Earth. We see no point in organizing an event that can be won by a simple weight of processing power, when just about all the competing programs are able to use computers with only a handful of processors. By allowing 20 cores, or 40, or 80, at the present time, we would be saying to the vast majority of chess programmers that, if they want their program to be able to give of its best, they must first acquire the use of an expensive computer system with a very large number of processors. That is not what we believe the World Computer Chess Championship should be about. One should not be able to buy the title in this way.
The ICGA has therefore decided to change the rules of the World Computer Chess Championship, starting with our 2009 event. For 2009 no entry will be permitted to run on a system with more than 8 cores. We have chosen the number 8 because such systems are readily available in the retail computer market. We will review this number every year in accordance with whatever we feel is appropriate, given the retail market at the time. But for 2009 the message is – no more than 8 cores will be allowed for any program competing in the World Computer Chess Championship.
There will, however, still be some scope for more powerful hardware systems to show off their capabilities. Alongside the World Computer Chess Championship the ICGA organizes the annual Computer Olympiad, and when there are two or more contestants we will organize, as part of the Computer Olympiad, an open chess tournament (or match if there are just two entries) in which hardware systems with more than 8 cores may compete. This will NOT be given the status of a world championship event – it will be the Computer Olympiad Open Chess Championship.
The ICGA is not making the same 8-core rule applicable to the Computer Olympiads, for those games in which the strongest programs have not yet reached the level of world champion human players. The reason for the different rules for different games is that our competitive goal in ICGA events is to encourage and assist the development of programs capable of defeating human world champions. This target has already been achieved in Chess, hence our competitive goal for Chess is now principally to discover which program is the best. The corresponding target has not yet been achieved in Go and several of the other games contested at the Computer Olympiad, hence the ICGA’s competitive goal for those games is partly to encourage the fastest possible progress towards that target.
We believe that the above decision is in keeping with the wishes of the majority of games programmers who compete at the World Computer Chess Championships.
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World Computer Chess Championship 2009 - Pamplona 10-18 May
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World Computer Chess Championship 2009 - Pamplona 10-18 May
The dates will be confirmed for this in the next few days and I will publish them here. There is one important rule change this year a maximum of 8 cores can be used for the Chess tournament. Below the details:
Last edited by Harvey Williamson on Thu Jan 08, 2009 4:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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- Sjeng
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There is nothing in the rule that says all engines will run on the same hardware. In fact, that almost certainly won't be the case.
It's a nice rule for people who already had fast 8 core systems, and everybody else can take out his wallet or be unfairly disadvantaged.
The rule is totally braindead and does absolutely NOTHING to level the playing field.
It's a nice rule for people who already had fast 8 core systems, and everybody else can take out his wallet or be unfairly disadvantaged.
The rule is totally braindead and does absolutely NOTHING to level the playing field.
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I find it funny how of the Three forums where this subject is talked about:
A: Rybka Forum Chats the most on it.
B: Talkchess comes a close second for Chats on this topic.
C: Hiarcs Forum which broke the story in the 1st place, Chats the least about it and yet still gets most of the blame for it or at least Harvey does.
How quickly this went from a discussion about the facts to pointing fingers and becoming a blame game is truly amazing.
A: Rybka Forum Chats the most on it.
B: Talkchess comes a close second for Chats on this topic.
C: Hiarcs Forum which broke the story in the 1st place, Chats the least about it and yet still gets most of the blame for it or at least Harvey does.
How quickly this went from a discussion about the facts to pointing fingers and becoming a blame game is truly amazing.
"Good decisions come from experience, and experience come from bad decisions."
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- turbojuice1122
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It's a stupid decision--now you simply have people coming in with strange processors and such that tend to have the same effect. These would be experimental types of situations, just as clustering methods with programs are also experimental situations. For consistency, they will find it necessary to eliminate this option soon, too. This goes completely contrary to how technology and software are both developing and how it will be on the market in 2-4 years.
It seems that the World Computer Chess Championships effectively ended in 2008.
It seems that the World Computer Chess Championships effectively ended in 2008.
The world one of programs of chess evaluates the potential of the software not of the hardware, if we depart from equality of hardware we will know which is the best program of chess in equality of conditions, otherwise it does not have felt the world one of computers of chess.
With Rybka3 and 40 Cores the boredom appeared and small emotion for the tilts of computers, the near world one of 2009 possibly already it does not gain Rybka and the throne yields to new version Hiarcs13 or to the new Naum 4 between others.....
What is looked is a major equality between the programs of chess to see in that details are more competitive the different programs, something similar to what goes on in the Formula 1 where the small details mark the difference and where there will be seen clearly the faults of every program that are concealed by an excess of Hardware, the perfection of these small details was improving very much the software of chess.
Regards...
With Rybka3 and 40 Cores the boredom appeared and small emotion for the tilts of computers, the near world one of 2009 possibly already it does not gain Rybka and the throne yields to new version Hiarcs13 or to the new Naum 4 between others.....
What is looked is a major equality between the programs of chess to see in that details are more competitive the different programs, something similar to what goes on in the Formula 1 where the small details mark the difference and where there will be seen clearly the faults of every program that are concealed by an excess of Hardware, the perfection of these small details was improving very much the software of chess.
Regards...
- turbojuice1122
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