WCCC Schedule + Book Rules + programmers representative

[Suj]

As now the book author cannot book for 2 engines why not also add the hardware from one team cannot be shared to other teams.i.e someone from say team x allowing remote access to a spare computer for team y to use as this really puts the book rule to question?

There are also examples of this in the past.

[Albert Silver]

This is Jaap's reply. It seems good to me.

Dear Remi and David,

This night I completed the Journal and arrived at similar ideas as Remi send to me in his reaction. My remarks are as follows
1. I would like to disbanding the continuous discussion on semi professionals.
2. I would like to attract new persons (fresh amateurs)
3. I would like to include the ICGA membership fee for one year because now I always have with 5-6 people discussions on this topic.
4. As one can understand the costs are for 10 years the same and should be raised.

My new proposal is
Fresh amateurs: 80 euro (in the hope to attract new people)
Amateurs / semiprofessionals: 100 euro.

I look forward to you approval.

Best regards,

Jaap



-----Original Message-----
From: Rémi Coulom [mailto:Remi.Coulom@univ-lille3.fr]
Sent: woensdag 31 augustus 2011 21:04
To: J.W. Hellemons
Cc: David Levy
Subject: Re: Emailing: RULES FOR THE 19th WORLD COMPUTER.docx

Hi,

Programmers are not happy with the raised fees. It seems particularly strange to punish the frequent participants.

Rémi

I can only hope this appearance of goodwill, will also lead to better coverage than last year. As is fairly well-known by now, I work as editor of Chessbase News, and as a long-time member of the computer chess community, I had thought to cover the WCCC last year for our news page.

The non-existent efforts by ICGA were so shameful I eventually refused, and believe me, it had to be absurdly bad for me to reach this point. I was in contact with both the Rybka team and Harvey Williamson, and was flabbergasted that the World COMPUTER Chess Championship, had no live relaying of the games, no website (someone pasted some results every few days in the most Notepad-dumpish format), no pictures, and NO GAMES. It was nuts! I was truly shocked and concluded this could not even be classified as incompetence, it was deliberate bad will on the organizers' part, I saw no other explanation for it.

If you, and whomever else is involved, can ensure these essentials are not overlooked, I will make sure it receives the due coverage in CB. If you or anyone can manage, pictures would be extremely welcome. I did a piece on Leiden 2010 because they made an effort to be visible to the world. If you wish to have the games relayed at Playchess, speak to Harvey or myself.

[Harvey Williamson]

I agree with Albert as someone who has to pay 500 euro's to enter a minimum expectation is a live broadcast and regular updates on the ICGA website.

This has been done in the past but only because people like me, Hans and GCP have done it with no help from the ICGA.

[hgm]

Well, what do you think of my ChessLive! viewer as a way to provide live covarage WCCC? Complete with engine scores, PVs and a chat now!

[Harvey Williamson]

Well, what do you think of my ChessLive! viewer as a way to provide live covarage WCCC? Complete with engine scores, PVs and a chat now!

Love it!! would be great.

[hgm]

It would require a bit of cooperation from the participants, of course, to get their PVs and scores.

It would also require a small change in the viewer to use two files with moves (one from each player), and then integrate those, but that should be easy.

[Harvey Williamson]

It would require a bit of cooperation from the participants, of course, to get their PVs and scores.

It would also require a small change in the viewer to use two files with moves (one from each player), and then integrate those, but that should be easy.

Just let me know what team Hiarcs would need to do to make this work!

[Don]

It would require a bit of cooperation from the participants, of course, to get their PVs and scores.

It would also require a small change in the viewer to use two files with moves (one from each player), and then integrate those, but that should be easy.

As long as each participant is connected at least to a local network provided for the tournament, it should not be difficult making something work. I don't know if everyone is going to be willing to use Xboard or go to extra trouble, but for a protocol adapter could be used for either winboard or UCI which passes everything through while keeping the moves and scores.

Polyglot could be modified (probably only slightly) to capture what is needed.

[Harvey Williamson]

It would require a bit of cooperation from the participants, of course, to get their PVs and scores.

It would also require a small change in the viewer to use two files with moves (one from each player), and then integrate those, but that should be easy.

As long as each participant is connected at least to a local network provided for the tournament, it should not be difficult making something work. I don't know if everyone is going to be willing to use Xboard or go to extra trouble, but for a protocol adapter could be used for either winboard or UCI which passes everything through while keeping the moves and scores.

Polyglot could be modified (probably only slightly) to capture what is needed.

It maybe an issue for people using remote desktop - but if there is a workaround?

[hgm]

Well, actually WinBoard/Xboard already implements capturing the required information, and save it to file. The demo you see at http://80.100.28.169/chess/chess.html is actually just a WinBoard running an engine tournament, where I configured to to put the game data in the required folder of the server tree. Which is possible, because the games are played on the server machine itself.

Of course when each player uses its own machine, such a setup is impossible, and it is unavoidable that the moves should be transferred from the machine running the engine to the server. So what I had in mind is let each participant run an ftp watchdog program on his machine, which then uploads the moves and PVs to a specified place on the central server. For those using WinBoard / XBoard this would be all they have to do.

Those using other software would have to somehow let it create the required files with moves and PVs. Many GUIs produce log files in real time, including all engine-GUI communication, and these could provide a good place to extract the data from.

I don't expect remote desktop would change anything (although I never used it). You would simply let the remote machine upload the required files to the server directly, bypassing the machine running the front-end desktop.