The actual Gunda story was pretty fractured at times. Here is what actually happened.syzygy wrote:Maybe they should also be able to veto participation in an author-based competition. Or at least those that contributed "significantly".Michel wrote:Given how much of SF's elo by now is due to "non-primary" contributors, this is really a strong thing to say.bob wrote:I don't think anyone cares about the contributor list.
The ICGA can of course make an exception for SF and accept it as a "non-author-based entry". That might upset some of the participants, but if it's for the good of the ICGA and/or its leadership, they might not care too much. (Sorry for that, but I just read the whole GUNDA story.)
The 1996 event was in Jakarta, being hosted by the university there. The CS chair (perhaps, I am not certain on this) asked David if they could enter a modified Crafty as a participant. David asked me and I replied "Sure. I was going to participate, but if they are interested, that works for me." And I left it at that. But each time the new participant list was published, no "Gunda-1" entry. I sent David/Tony an email and they replied "we have not received an entry from them, do you want to enter yourself?" And I replied yes. I filled out the application, GM Roman Dzhindi had a friend that volunteered to operate AND buy us a pentium-pro box to use. He also bought the airline ticket and set up his room reservation at his own cost. Then at the last minute along came Gunda-1. Now there was a quandary, in that our guy had already bought a non-refundable airline ticket, booked a room, had sent the pentium pro to me to install linux, + crafty, plus 3-4-5 piece endgame tables, and then I had FedEx'ed it on to Jakarta. David promptly contacted me for advice. He did not want to refuse them entry since they were hosting the event, he did not want to exclude the real Crafty after the expenses we had spent, so I suggested they discuss it at the player's meeting, which they did. No one raised an objection after hearing the explanation, and the only stipulation the players wanted was to request that Gunda-1 and Crafty NOT be paired against each other unless it was absolutely unavoidable, for obvious reasons.
It was a silly mistake, but not one anyone would have been very likely to predict, so we made the best of it. Funny thing was the two programs tied for places 4-5, which was not expected. Crafty could certainly have won that event with a little luck, but you would not normally expect both to finish at the same position.
This was also the event where the newly seen "Ruy Lopez - crafty variation" first showed up. I can tell more about that if anyone is interested.