mhull wrote:Congratulations on your impressive debut!
ICGA must acknowledge that it's pretty dumb not to have automated interaces after your having to play two tournaments simultaneously, manually!
Thanks!
I must say the ICGA handled this in a very incompetent way, or peraps even less than honest. When I registered, there was no schedule known yet. So I registered only for the WCCC and the Chinese Chess tournement, and not for the open Chess tournament, not to push my luck, and make it easier for ICGA to create a viable schedule. I suspected that they would not play the two Chess events simultaneously, which would have allowed them to schedule the open Chess and Chinese Chess tournaments simultaneously.
But when I received a confirmation letter, I saw Joker's name appearing in both WCCC and open tournament. I then wrote David Levy that I had registered only for WCCC, but that I was willing to switch that to the open tournament if that would make it easier for them to void collissions n the schedule.
I then received a personal e-mail from David Levy that they would see to it that it would be no problem to participate in all three. It turns out he then ordered Joke Hellemons to make a schedule that would keep all three events apart. As this was obviously impossible (the total duration of WCCC + open tournament + blitz tournament cover the entire duration of the event), Joke ignored that instruction. The Chinese Chess (a 16-hour event) had also to avoid collision with the accompanying conference, and was planned as a 4-day event, Monday-Wednesday late afternoon & evening, and Thursday (when there was no conference) morning.
The schedule for WCCC and open tournament was decided only in the players meeting. It turned out they wanted to make a 1-day open tournament, and I tried to push for that being on Saturday or Sunday. I could then have withdrawn from the WCCC, and play the open tournament in stead. But Jaap wanted to reserve the weekend for WCCC, as there are by far the most on-line viewers then. So a majority decided that the open tournament should be scheduled on Wednesday. This made the Chinese Chess event overlap both.
At that point I could have played hardball, and threaten to retire Joker from both WCCC and open tournament. If I would have considered myself a serious contender with either Joker or HaQiKi D, I would certainly have done so. They would not have liked that at all, but without a viable alternative there would not have been much they could do about it. Meaning that I would have been stuck here on my own in Pamplona Saturday-Monday without anything to do, as I could not change my plane ticket. Later it occurred to me that there was also a blitz tourney that I could have dropped, and that it would perhaps have been possible to schedule the open event Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon / evening, and the blitz Thursday morning, (so I could have dropped those) and plan the two rounds of the Chinese Chess were HaQiKi D had a bye on Monday.
I noticed that the other Chinese-Chess participants pretty much make their own rules, ignoring everyting that is in the ICGA rule book. Amongst themselves they actually were playing some of the games automatically. All of the other engines were private, using dedicated protocols, but they did seem to have some protocol for playing on an ICS (or peer to peer; my Chinese was not good enough to figure that out
). But defenitely two engines on different laptops were playing each other, and someone was watching the game from a third laptop. That coud not be used against my engine, of course.
