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Last minute modifications during a tournament have led to some very humorous events over the years; I encourage other authors to do this as it's a sure source of entertainment.

CThinker wrote: Does Charles have a comparable hardware that the Rybka or Sjeng cluster use? Unless he has, then no real validation will happen.

If you want to emulate the tournament setup, you can do with a 1-cpu PC and a *lot* of patience.

However, as I pointed out before, what gain does having the binary give you? Would the result of the past years have been any different if Charles had had a Rybka binary?

Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:

CThinker wrote: Does Charles have a comparable hardware that the Rybka or Sjeng cluster use? Unless he has, then no real validation will happen.

If you want to emulate the tournament setup, you can do with a 1-cpu PC and a *lot* of patience.

However, as I pointed out before, what gain does having the binary give you? Would the result of the past years have been any different if Charles had had a Rybka binary?

It would have helped in our ICGA investigation, as we could know _exactly_ what code participated in an event, rather than having to use dates of release and dates of tournaments to make an educated guess as to which version was used in which event...

And it avoids the "I lost the source to version XXX so I can't let you see what I used in that event."

We felt it beyond unlikely that everyone would agree to providing a copy of the source used. We even discussed perhaps an encrypted copy, but then the old "I seem to have forgotten the decryption key" would close that door as well.

bob wrote: We felt it beyond unlikely that everyone would agree to providing a copy of the source used.

At least in the WCCC, if you enter the tournament, you agree to that rule. Even in Leiden, if you enter, you agree to provide source if requested.

Those tournaments tend to have even a large number of commercial entries.

Maybe it's because it's almost never enforced.

Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:

bob wrote: We felt it beyond unlikely that everyone would agree to providing a copy of the source used.

At least in the WCCC, if you enter the tournament, you agree to that rule. Even in Leiden, if you enter, you agree to provide source if requested.

Those tournaments tend to have even a large number of commercial entries.

Maybe it's because it's almost never enforced.

The problem is the "if requested". The Rybka case came up after several previous events. There's no way to go back and request old source. Vas claimed that Rybka 3 source was lost, remember. I certainly lost many of my old versions many years ago. And I learned to back up on at least two different platforms as a result. The binaries would be required at the start of each event, from everyone, and then they would simply be archived somewhere until a need for them at some future point in time. I don't think everyone would submit source at the start of the event, being too worried that any sort of leak might give up some super-secret whizbang or whatever....

sje wrote:Last minute modifications during a tournament have led to some very humorous events over the years; I encourage other authors to do this as it's a sure source of entertainment.

OK, you have a point. between round modifications are good for lots of fun. Pawns on the 8th rank. Disappearing pieces. infinite loops. Subscript violations and resulting crashes that happen every time the game is restarted.

I am happy to provide any tourney organiser access to Sjeng's cluster at short notice and random during the event for any validation purposes.

Suj wrote:I am happy to provide any tourney organiser access to Sjeng's cluster at short notice and random during the event for any validation purposes.

In fact if all machines run teamviewer and give the td the access code he could take a look when he wants during the event.

Something similar and web based might be a better solution.Allowance to stop access inbetween rounds to felicitate book editing/tuning changing settings.

Start of game we could have something to imply remote access provided with td able to view playing machine.

bob wrote:

sje wrote:Last minute modifications during a tournament have led to some very humorous events over the years; I encourage other authors to do this as it's a sure source of entertainment.

OK, you have a point. between round modifications are good for lots of fun. Pawns on the 8th rank. Disappearing pieces. infinite loops. Subscript violations and resulting crashes that happen every time the game is restarted.

More than 20 years ago one of my very first chess programs played a small private tournament against programs of some friends. In one game my program displayed a "√" character on the square f5 ... Stefan Edlich might remember it. The "square root bug" was caused by not restoring the board correctly when taking back an ep capture, leaving the square in an incorrect state.

I had to do a "last minute fix" there, of course

Sven