lkaufman wrote: ↑Wed Jul 03, 2019 5:54 am
Regarding your delay suggestion, is this just to create the illusion of a normal game?
No, it's because the slower the human's opponent plays, the better the human plays.
Try some extreme case:
Human 1 gets 1 minute on the clock.
Human 2 gets 2 hours on the clock.
What is human's 2 best strategy? Well, it turns out that the longest time used by human 2, the better human 1's level will be, so that in a normal rhythm, human 1 will play at a level much higher than 1 0 bullet. Human 2 would need to find a sweet spot where their own moves benefit from the extra time, but they're played at a rhythm that doesn't allow the opponent to increase their "bullet level" (which is incredibly low. I have actually checked, and my 10 0 blitz level is higher than Nakamura's 1 0 level. But if we played time handicap he'd destroy me, why? Because I can't play against his 1 0 level, because his level would increase tremendously as he waits for my moves, getting close to his 10 0 level.)
With computers it's similar (except that it doesn't work the other way around, with computers being really bad at pondering) so human with 1 0 on the clock against computer with 1 0 on the clock would play at their bullet level, but at 1 0 for them against 120 min for the comp, humans would play at a much higher level, as long as the comp plays the same moves it'd have played with 1 minute on the clock (these are just the extremes). Move delay solves for all this.
lkaufman wrote: ↑Wed Jul 03, 2019 5:54 am
I personally prefer material
Except that's no longer chess. The engine wasn't built with handicap in mind, the human's elo wasn't built from playing material handicap games, so I don't understand how playing a different game altogether is better to people. Like, you don't see tournaments between humans where they're all set at the same level by removing their material (so one has to play against a Magnus Carlsen that has his two Bishops removed; something like this was tried at chesscube without much success), why is computer-human games different?
Time handicaps are natural, lichess allows users to go "berserk" by cutting their time in half, this is clearly still chess played at different levels, but when you make the engine play high chess level moves instantly, you don't let the human play at the level they'd play against an opponent that required that time to find that great move (unlike engines.) I hope move delay's effects get investigated more.
Your beliefs create your reality, so be careful what you wish for.
