Battle of the Crowns -- volunteer idea, and looking for sugg

[Dann Corbit]

Geschrieben von:/Posted by: Dann Corbit at 28 February 2000 21:39:16:
One way to generate a lot of volunteers is to play some of the matches on FICS or ICC (as the participants prefer). That way, we could get volunteers for games in 4 game blocks. If we did it strictly that way, that would require a heap of volunteers:
9*8 + 13*12 + 11*12 + 7*8 = 416 pairs = 832 volunteers.
That is a heap of a lot of volunteers, but there are a lot of people on FICS and ICC that might enjoy participating in a tournament like that.
I would really like to keep the time controls up to as slow as can be tolerated. A massive number of volunteers would help greatly in that regard.
Besides which, the generated games would be of excellent quality and be something of a joy to go over. At fast time controls, computers can make really assinine moves.
I'm open to any sort of suggestsions. I want to make this a "people's" tournament, which reflects the interests and views of a broad cross-section of the Winboard community. However, if it turns out to be blitz or faster, I will disavow any knowlege of the entire proceeding.

What other ideas can we generate? I think it is very important to do a round robin format because that is really the only fair way to do a tournament like this. Swiss tournaments only show the best player with accuracy. And they also assume that you have accurate rankings to start with. I want to know the strength of the whole field, and I don't think we really know how strong the programs are under controlled conditions.
I think that any program which participates must be freely available to anyone. That means that programs like JRCP which are available only to testers would be disqualified. Also, professional programs like Nimzo will not be allowed. It has to be freely downloadable to everyone.
Further, I think the version used should be one of the versions that has a pointer to it from the Winboard download lists. No special, customized versions that are not available to everyone else.
I think it would be very good to solicit the program author's input to set up the programs in an ideal way.
We won't *have* to use ICC or FICS for all the matches. Someone may have a way to autoplay a large number of them, and greatly reduce the number of needed volunteers.



My FTP site

[Colin Frayn]

Geschrieben von:/Posted by: Colin Frayn at 29 February 2000 12:10:22:
Als Antwort auf:/As an answer to: Battle of the Crowns -- volunteer idea, and looking for suggestions geschrieben von:/posted by: Dann Corbit at 28 February 2000 21:39:16:

One way to generate a lot of volunteers is to play some of the matches on FICS or ICC (as the participants prefer). That way, we could get volunteers for games in 4 game blocks. If we did it strictly that way, that would require a heap of volunteers:

Problem with that is that some programs like to be tweaked in certain ways and only people that have played with them a lot will know exactly what options make them play best. We don't want to bias the results by having people use programs they've never seen before and setting them up badly/not getting them to run at all and forfeiting matches.
Other than that it's a good idea.
Cheers,
Col

ColChess Homepage

[Gabor Szots]

Geschrieben von:/Posted by: Gabor Szots at 01 March 2000 10:19:48:
Als Antwort auf:/As an answer to: Battle of the Crowns -- volunteer idea, and looking for suggestions geschrieben von:/posted by: Dann Corbit at 28 February 2000 21:39:16:

One way to generate a lot of volunteers is to play some of the matches on FICS or ICC (as the participants prefer). That way, we could get volunteers for games in 4 game blocks. If we did it strictly that way, that would require a heap of volunteers:
9*8 + 13*12 + 11*12 + 7*8 = 416 pairs = 832 volunteers.
That is a heap of a lot of volunteers, but there are a lot of people on FICS and ICC that might enjoy participating in a tournament like that.
I would really like to keep the time controls up to as slow as can be tolerated. A massive number of volunteers would help greatly in that regard.
Besides which, the generated games would be of excellent quality and be something of a joy to go over. At fast time controls, computers can make really assinine moves.
I'm open to any sort of suggestsions. I want to make this a "people's" tournament, which reflects the interests and views of a broad cross-section of the Winboard community. However, if it turns out to be blitz or faster, I will disavow any knowlege of the entire proceeding.

Hi, Dann,
I like the idea of a people's tournament, but can you organize it with 832 people? We have 416 pairings, 4 games pro pairing, which means 1664 games. If we compromise with 1 hour/game, that is 3328 hour's playing time. That is almost 20 weeks for only one man, and 80 weeks if he can play only 6 hours a day. But with say 80 volunteers it is only one week, and nobody (including you yourself)is overburdened. It's easier to organize, you receive results better distributed in time, you have more time to process them, you can publish partial results, making our excitation higher. How about that?
Best regards,
Gabor

[Dann Corbit]

Geschrieben von:/Posted by: Dann Corbit at 01 March 2000 20:04:44:
Als Antwort auf:/As an answer to: Re: Battle of the Crowns -- volunteer idea geschrieben von:/posted by: Gabor Szots at 01 March 2000 10:19:48:

One way to generate a lot of volunteers is to play some of the matches on FICS or ICC (as the participants prefer). That way, we could get volunteers for games in 4 game blocks. If we did it strictly that way, that would require a heap of volunteers:
9*8 + 13*12 + 11*12 + 7*8 = 416 pairs = 832 volunteers.
That is a heap of a lot of volunteers, but there are a lot of people on FICS and ICC that might enjoy participating in a tournament like that.
I would really like to keep the time controls up to as slow as can be tolerated. A massive number of volunteers would help greatly in that regard.
Besides which, the generated games would be of excellent quality and be something of a joy to go over. At fast time controls, computers can make really assinine moves.
I'm open to any sort of suggestsions. I want to make this a "people's" tournament, which reflects the interests and views of a broad cross-section of the Winboard community. However, if it turns out to be blitz or faster, I will disavow any knowlege of the entire proceeding.

Hi, Dann,
I like the idea of a people's tournament, but can you organize it with 832 people? We have 416 pairings, 4 games pro pairing, which means 1664 games. If we compromise with 1 hour/game, that is 3328 hour's playing time. That is almost 20 weeks for only one man, and 80 weeks if he can play only 6 hours a day. But with say 80 volunteers it is only one week, and nobody (including you yourself)is overburdened. It's easier to organize, you receive results better distributed in time, you have more time to process them, you can publish partial results, making our excitation higher. How about that?

It's a very ambitious project, and you are right that I am out of my mind to think of it. But all of my projects are like that. Compared to CAP, this one is a pipsqueak.
I think you are right that I should have a fallback idea in place. But I don't want to abandon the idea of longer time control until I really have to. I think we can probably see how many volunteers we can get, and use that to figure out how slow we can make the games. If we get enough people interested, I don't see why we can't run slow, high quality games.
I am glad to get any suggestions.
I would also appreciate occasional shouts and advertizements on FICS and ICC by people who are intereste in the project so that we can gather interest. I figure it is probably at least a month before we can be ready to go.