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Topic: 2005 World Championship (Read 2616 times) |
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MrBrain
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Arimaa player #344
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Re: 2005 World Championship
« Reply #15 on: Oct 8th, 2004, 8:59am » |
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Well, all I'm saying is that hopefully the new scheduling mechanism will be much better than last year. I could have been unlucky with the one last year, and not been able to finish a game. By being able to rank times 1, 2, and 3, both players will undoubtably find a time that suits the both of them. The 8 pm thing was just an example. Not saying that it's going to be 8 pm for everyone, obviously. And last year, your situation was unique. You were out the entire week. In that case, no time control or scheduling mechanism would help.
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99of9
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Gnobby's creator (player #314)
 
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Re: 2005 World Championship
« Reply #16 on: Oct 8th, 2004, 11:23am » |
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on Oct 8th, 2004, 8:59am, MrBrain wrote:| By being able to rank times 1, 2, and 3, both players will undoubtably find a time that suits the both of them. The 8 pm thing was just an example. Not saying that it's going to be 8 pm for everyone, obviously. And last year, your situation was unique. You were out the entire week. In that case, no time control or scheduling mechanism would help. |
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I agree that the new scheduling system is better than the previous one. But I don't think it is SO much better that it suddenly opens up 4-6 hour slots in everyone's 2-person-combined timetables.
To me, your 8pm example implied that it was going to be easy to find a weeknight time at which both players would have 4-6 hours free, and that anyone unable to accept a 2am finish every now and then was not living in todays world. Am I correct about your implications?
[As it happens, yes, I personally am willing to live with a 2am finish.] My point in reply was not that timezones mean that 8pm is not universal. My point was that even if you can accept a 6 hour game that finishes at 2am, your European opponent would have to accept a 6 hour game that may finish at later than 7am. Not many people I know would be willing to accept that unless it was incredibly important, or they had nothing important on the next day. Disparate timezones mean that finding mutually acceptable times to play is much harder than your simplistic argument implied.
Just to be sure this is clear, let's just take the example of a Frenchman willing to stay up until 2am that has to play a New Yorker who is able to knock off his job at the not unreasonable time of 6pm, and immediately start arimaa. Let's try to line up a weeknight time for these people. They luckily turn out to have absolutely nothing on on weeknights... Note that 6pm New York = approx 11pm France. This kind of game clearly cannot go on for the hours you suggest for the European. If both are workers, there is no other alternative during the week (unless the US player wants to wake up at 1am, in which case they might sneak in a quick game before the European goes to work).
So for your time control, intercontinental games involving two weekday workers would all need to be played on the weekend.
You are right that my situation last year would not have been helped by a time control or scheduler. But it is not that unique, and it is simply the end of a busy-ness spectrum that most of us find ourselves on. I'm not saying that anything should have been done differently last year. Human constraints mean that I forfeit, and that was fine by me. My point was that even solving a one-body problem for 6 weeks in a row is not always trivial, a two-body problem is automatically much more difficult, so we have to understand Omar's compromises on game timing.
If we insist on 4ish hour games, then the argument I outlined earlier suggests that no arimaa player should be able to go for a weekend away during a 6 week period without forfeiting! I'd much rather get well-scheduled games set up and accept the fact that one or two players won't be able to handle the pace and may blunder.
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MrBrain
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Arimaa player #344
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Re: 2005 World Championship
« Reply #17 on: Oct 8th, 2004, 12:48pm » |
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Well, you've clearly thought this through a lot better than I have. So I'll agree with you that scheduling is hard. But I still feel strongly that official games shouldn't be less than 2 minutes per move (I think even that's fast), regardless of the scheduling difficulties. If the games are worth playing at all, they should be played under reasonable time controls. It's a "World Championship". People should be willing to go to some lengths to play in a championship. Last year, most of the time slots I picked were in the middle of the night. It's not that I'd like to play in the middle of the night, but rather that the scheduling mechanism forced me to pick 30 slots.
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99of9
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Gnobby's creator (player #314)
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Re: 2005 World Championship
« Reply #18 on: Nov 16th, 2004, 9:50am » |
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Hi Omar,
The prediction contest for the WC is not allowing predictions for the first round. I know that's what your rules officially stated, but that was before we figured out such a neat prediction scoring method that even works for inequal games. I think it would be better to include these first two games.
Toby
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omar
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Arimaa player #2
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Re: 2005 World Championship
« Reply #19 on: Nov 17th, 2004, 6:28pm » |
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Thanks for that reminder. I've changed it so that we can predict on all the games.
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Fritzlein
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Arimaa player #706
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Re: 2005 World Championship
« Reply #20 on: Nov 17th, 2004, 6:38pm » |
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Thanks for changing it. With only 10 participants this year, there will only be 11 or 12 games total, so including the first two in the prediction contest makes a significant difference. I think the scores do balance out reasonably well for the players involved. On average the underdog will score fewer points, but if the underdog pulls off an upset, s/he gains a lot of points on the entire field, so it's basically a wash.
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