Leo Dijksman has decided to quit running the WBEC tournament.
Leo Dijksman wrote:
Edition 20 will be not played, I decided to stop after edition 19 for the reason I have no fun anymore with computerchess tournments, far tooo many clones/deratives and some authors seems not to be very willing to fix their own bugs (they are not interrested? or are they not familiar with there "own" code so they dont know how to fix it??)
He has been running WBEC Ridderkerk for 12 years and 19 editions. It is, along with ChessWar, the most prestigious of the "basement" tournaments. In many cases, WBEC and ChessWar are the only way some authors get any recognition for their engines.
I hope he changes his mind. If not, then he should be thanked for running WBEC Ridderkerk for as long as he has.
Adam Hair wrote:Leo Dijksman has decided to quit running the WBEC tournament.
Leo Dijksman wrote:
Edition 20 will be not played, I decided to stop after edition 19 for the reason I have no fun anymore with computerchess tournments, far tooo many clones/deratives and some authors seems not to be very willing to fix their own bugs (they are not interrested? or are they not familiar with there "own" code so they dont know how to fix it??)
He has been running WBEC Ridderkerk for 12 years and 19 editions. It is, along with ChessWar, the most prestigious of the "basement" tournaments. In many cases, WBEC and ChessWar are the only way some authors get any recognition for their engines.
I hope he changes his mind. If not, then he should be thanked for running WBEC Ridderkerk for as long as he has.
The first and the best of them all.
Leo has contributed over the years to detect the most obscure bugs in Gaviota. The main reason is that his tournaments were always run to exercise every single muscle of the engine, including book, book learning, position learning, logging, pondering, SMP, resign mode, draw detection, TBs, time management and any other custom set up you may have.
The best thing any new author could do, was to send the engine to his tournament and try to keep up with his bug reports. I will be forever grateful.
After the end of UEL (UCI Engine Ligue) from Patrick Buchmann few years ago, the end of WBEC is a very sad news for computer chess, especially the little engines.
I basically wrote the WB protocol support for BigLion through trial-and-error, not fully understanding the protocol. Leo patiently uncovered a multitude of protocol bugs during that long process.
(I did fully understanding the protocol later when writing ChessGUI.)
Sad news indeed! Patrick's UCI Engine Ligue and Leo's WBEC tournament made releasing and improving BikJump in 2007 so much fun for me. I could not wait to see how a new release would do in their tournaments.
Thanks for all your time in computer chess and I hope you change your mind!
Adam Hair wrote:Leo Dijksman has decided to quit running the WBEC tournament.
Leo Dijksman wrote:
Edition 20 will be not played, I decided to stop after edition 19 for the reason I have no fun anymore with computerchess tournments, far tooo many clones/deratives and some authors seems not to be very willing to fix their own bugs (they are not interrested? or are they not familiar with there "own" code so they dont know how to fix it??)
He has been running WBEC Ridderkerk for 12 years and 19 editions. It is, along with ChessWar, the most prestigious of the "basement" tournaments. In many cases, WBEC and ChessWar are the only way some authors get any recognition for their engines.
I hope he changes his mind. If not, then he should be thanked for running WBEC Ridderkerk for as long as he has.
Woah! That is a really big blow to our hobby.
I really do hope that Leo gets his enthusiasm back and resumes his testing. His work has been invaluable to engine authors and to the general computer chess community.
In my opinion, his testing has been more valuable than anybody else's, including the various testing groups.
