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Topic: 2013 World Championship (Read 10705 times) |
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Adanac
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Re: 2013 World Championship
« Reply #30 on: Jan 15th, 2013, 6:56am » |
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on Jan 15th, 2013, 2:08am, Boo wrote:If the UTC is the official game time, I would like to see not only in the email, but also in the scheduler (one more column next to YLT), also in the Scheduled Game count down window.
BTW I find it confusing when I see my game scheduled at "Sun 10:00 pm". Is it YLT or UTC? Would be more clear if it was "Sun 8:00 pm UTC (Sun 10:00 pm YLT)" |
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I like this idea. For players that have never had a problem with YLT, this seems a lot more convenient.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2013 World Championship
« Reply #31 on: Jan 15th, 2013, 9:01am » |
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on Jan 15th, 2013, 2:20am, Arimabuff wrote:I hope the time given in the game room for the games is still the local one.
Is it? |
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Yes, if you see your correct local time in the upper left of the game room.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2013 World Championship
« Reply #32 on: Jan 15th, 2013, 9:28am » |
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on Jan 15th, 2013, 2:08am, Boo wrote:| If the UTC is the official game time, I would like to see not only in the email, but also in the scheduler (one more column next to YLT), also in the Scheduled Game count down window. |
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Good ideas. Alas, I can't change the way the game room works and I am loath to put yet more requests in Omar's lap. I guess no matter how much I dislike time zones and wish that the whole world would just use UTC, I am going to run up against practical obstacles and need to compromise.
Quote:| BTW I find it confusing when I see my game scheduled at "Sun 10:00 pm". Is it YLT or UTC? Would be more clear if it was "Sun 8:00 pm UTC (Sun 10:00 pm YLT)" |
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Ah, sorry, I thought in the e-mail I did say, "Note that this time is expressed in UTC this round...". But it should also have a UTC directly after it to make it even more clear.
One thing I feel strongly about is that I can't ever give YLT without a caveat that it could be wrong and that relying on it can result in forfeit. When we discussed Brendan_M's case in chat, there was a strong consensus that it would not be fair to forfeit him since the server gave him the wrong time. But the server CANNOT KNOW his correct local time. There is no way to fix it so that YLT is guaranteed to be accurate. And in that context, it is untenable to give people a free excuse for being late. People who are late must be subject to forfeit, or the tournament will devolve into chaos. When I give game times in YLT, I will only do it in a way where the given YLT time can be wrong, and even when it is wrong we will all meet in the chat room after the player shows up late and all agree, "Yes, he should lose by forfeit, even though the server gave him the wrong time." If we can't get that consensus, then I'm going to inconvenience everyone as much as I have to inconvenience them to put the responsibility of knowing the correct time on the players' shoulders.
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| « Last Edit: Jan 15th, 2013, 9:31am by Fritzlein » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2013 World Championship
« Reply #33 on: Jan 15th, 2013, 9:56am » |
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on Jan 15th, 2013, 6:03am, chessandgo wrote:| Btw the pairing email says "Your Round 2 game against has been scheduled for Thr 12:00 am UTC" when one gets a bye, don't be surprised for the next rounds! |
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Oops, sorry, Jean. Next time I can uncheck the player(s) with a bye so that they don't get a confusing e-mail saying they have a game against <blank>. Enjoy your off week! 
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Boo
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Re: 2013 World Championship
« Reply #34 on: Jan 15th, 2013, 11:28am » |
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Quote:Quote:
BTW I find it confusing when I see my game scheduled at "Sun 10:00 pm". Is it YLT or UTC? Would be more clear if it was "Sun 8:00 pm UTC (Sun 10:00 pm YLT)"
Ah, sorry, I thought in the e-mail I did say, "Note that this time is expressed in UTC this round...". But it should also have a UTC directly after it to make it even more clear. |
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I was talking about the arimaa.com server displaying game time in the "My games" and "Sceduled games" sections, and you answered about the email.
The point is if you change the official time zone to UTC, shouldn't it also be available in a gameroom? E.g. someone who is not reading emails might say "Server showed my game time incorrectly, thus I was late." or "I thought gameroom displays game time in UTC".
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2013 World Championship
« Reply #35 on: Jan 15th, 2013, 11:37am » |
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on Jan 15th, 2013, 11:28am, Boo wrote:The point is if you change the official time zone to UTC, shouldn't it also be available in a gameroom? E.g. someone who is not reading emails might say "Server showed my game time incorrectly, thus I was late." or "I thought gameroom displays game time in UTC".
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Yep, I think if I ruled the server, I would do everything in UTC, not try to guess the user's time zone, and not even permit the user to select a time zone. There would be no such thing as a time zone. I would enforce universal time for the whole world, the way it should be. (Also everyone would have to speak Esperanto. jk) But it is Omar's server, and YLT is with us to stay. Since the server tries to give YLT, I just have to work in that context.
Maybe focusing on UTC was not the most effective way to address the issue. Maybe instead of saying "You must verify that UTC matches your YLT offest," I should instead say, "You must log in to the game room to verify that the time in the upper left-hand corner matches the time where you are." Then I can include the same threats about it being the players' responsibility and forfeiting for being late, yadda yadda.
I'm open to different solutions as long as the solution includes everyone agreeing that a player who shows up late due to YLT being wrong should lose by forfeit anyway.
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| « Last Edit: Jan 15th, 2013, 11:38am by Fritzlein » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2013 World Championship
« Reply #36 on: Jan 23rd, 2013, 7:54am » |
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Round 2 went smoothly. There were no forfeits; all of the players showed up on time. Thank you, everyone, for your commitment to the tournament!
Sixteen of the nineteen games were decided over the board. There was only one resignation, directly before forced goal, and two timeouts. Unfortunately one of the timeouts was a due to loss of connection on the user's end. I had no decisions to make as Tournament Director, which is a very comfortable feeling.
The server had a technical problem and was down for almost two hours. We are very lucky this didn't overlap with any games. The root cause is unknown. Omar will accelerate his planned move of arimaa.com to a new server in case the outage was related to the present server being old.
I noticed 36 simultaneous logins on Saturday and 25 players in chat on Monday, both eclipsing our high-water marks from Round 1. Unfortunately, I reset the radio relay before checking the number of peak radio listeners on Sunday, so I don't know whether we broke our first-round record on that score too. In any case it was great to have some live audio commentary of nearly every game. Thanks again to clyring and Arimabuff for their heroic commentary efforts.
There were four upsets in Round 2 as compared to only two upsets in Round 1. There should be many more upsets in the coming round given that the games are getting paired more and more evenly. I look forward to even more drama than we have already had.
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2013 World Championship
« Reply #37 on: Feb 10th, 2013, 11:46am » |
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About two hours ago, I received the following message from aurelian. I duplicate it here in the interests of transparency, so that everyone can know my decision and the thought process behind it.
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In the Game 256307 there is the possibility of an timer error.
First there where some technical dificulties regardingme pressing the "send move" button.
Secondly I have not wathced the timer closely because of beeing focuset on the game butI think some issue haveoccuredduring the game, culminating in the final timing out.
If possible please check any server records.
A similar error was reported in this unofficial game http://arimaa.com/arimaa/games/jsShowGame.cgi?gid=256835&s=b.
Kindly Aurelian.
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First, let me clarify that the intent of the rules is to immediately resume any game which times out due server error. We would like such games to be decided over the board by continued play. This is the primary reason that a Tournament Coordinator is on call for every game.
Second, I anticipated that there might be some reason that a game would time out due to server error, and that it would not be immediately restarted. My intention in that case was to vacate the result and give both players byes before the next round started.
It never occurred to me that a player would ask for an investigation eight days after timing out, so I didn't say anything about it in the rules. Since the rules are not explicit, I am in the uncomfortable position of enforcing a rule that I assumed without saying, namely that if the result of a game is not changed promptly, it can't be changed at all. A responsibility rests on the involved player to immediately raise the possibility of server error, so that it can be investigated and dealt with in a timely manner. In this case, the next round has been paired and partially played; it would be a grave disruption to now move someone from the Swiss section into the elimination section.
Thus, no matter what evidence exists that the server was at fault for aurelian's timeout in game 256307, I will not now change the result. Even if it could be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that, for example, the server received move 35g in time but was too overloaded to process it, it is too late for such proof to affect the standings.
That said, I am curious what evidence would be present if we looked for it. The game event log shows:
Code:1359832465 [Sat Feb 2 19:14:25 2013] move 35b received from b [re7s he5w Dd6n hd5n]
1359832465 [Sat Feb 2 19:14:25 2013] after 35b, move used:14 wresv:131 bresv:145 game:4429
1359832657 [Sat Feb 2 19:17:37 2013] game finished with result b t
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Thus three minutes and twelve seconds after Silver's last move, the game was recorded as a time win for Silver. That is 192 seconds. The stated Gold reserve of 131 seconds plus a 60-second move increment is 191 seconds. Since a player may use all his remaining time, leaving zero seconds in reserve, it is as expected that the server would wait one additional second before recording a timeout.
The load averages logged on the server for the preceding several minutes were
Code:19:18 load average: 1.42, 1.41, 1.37
19:17 load average: 1.37, 1.39, 1.36
19:16 load average: 1.33, 1.39, 1.36
19:15 load average: 1.41, 1.42, 1.38
19:14 load average: 1.40, 1.43, 1.38
19:13 load average: 1.32, 1.42, 1.37
19:12 load average: 1.51, 1.48, 1.39
19:11 load average: 1.55, 1.48, 1.39
19:10 load average: 1.52, 1.45, 1.38
19:09 load average: 1.45, 1.43, 1.37
19:08 load average: 1.78, 1.47, 1.39
19:07 load average: 1.40, 1.39, 1.36
19:06 load average: 1.46, 1.41, 1.36
19:05 load average: 1.51, 1.42, 1.36
19:04 load average: 1.49, 1.39, 1.35
19:03 load average: 1.46, 1.37, 1.34
19:02 load average: 1.37, 1.31, 1.32
19:01 load average: 1.38, 1.31, 1.32
19:00 load average: 1.29, 1.26, 1.31
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The load average was never above 2.0, which for a four-processor machine means that it was running quite comfortably the whole time.
The connection logs from pingdom.com are:
Code:Up 02/02/2013 19:18:49 274 ms Falkenberg, Sweden
Up 02/02/2013 19:17:49 161 ms Portland, OR
Up 02/02/2013 19:16:49 285 ms Amsterdam 4, Netherlands
Up 02/02/2013 19:15:49 233 ms Strasbourg 3, France
Up 02/02/2013 19:14:49 66 ms Tampa, FL
Up 02/02/2013 19:13:49 265 ms Madrid, Spain
Up 02/02/2013 19:12:49 381 ms Zurich, Switzerland
Up 02/02/2013 19:11:49 142 ms Phoenix, AZ
Up 02/02/2013 19:10:49 204 ms Roubaix, France
Up 02/02/2013 19:09:49 393 ms Falkenberg, Sweden
Up 02/02/2013 19:08:49 162 ms Portland, OR
Up 02/02/2013 19:07:49 372 ms Amsterdam 4, Netherlands
Up 02/02/2013 19:06:49 228 ms Strasbourg 3, France
Up 02/02/2013 19:05:49 164 ms Tampa, FL
Up 02/02/2013 19:04:49 282 ms Madrid, Spain
Up 02/02/2013 19:03:49 268 ms Zurich, Switzerland
Up 02/02/2013 19:02:49 160 ms Phoenix, AZ
Up 02/02/2013 19:01:50 205 ms Roubaix, France
Up 02/02/2013 19:00:49 379 ms Falkenberg, Sweden
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This shows a slowest ping time of 393 milliseconds, and indeed no ping times over 500 milliseconds for all of February 2, indicating that the server was quickly accessible from many different locations.
These logs, of course, do not prove that there wasn't a technical problem. It may well be that some sever issue occurred that is reflected neither in load average nor in ping times. It could also be that some application error or lag time occurred on the client side. If any such source of technical problems caused or contributed to a timeout, it is unfortunate, but regrettably tournament game results can't be changed except when there is evidence the arimaa.com server itself was at fault.
To return to my first point, if anyone suspects that they have timed out due to server error, please immediately page the Tournament Coordinator that is on call, so that the logs can be investigated while there is still the possibility of resuming the game and finishing it over the board on the spot.
Thanks,
Fritz
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mistre
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Re: 2013 World Championship
« Reply #38 on: Feb 11th, 2013, 10:07pm » |
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I'm curious to know.... If Browni3141 does not have connection problems vs Novacat and beat him - who would I have been paired with in Round 6?
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Janzert
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Re: 2013 World Championship
« Reply #39 on: Feb 11th, 2013, 10:12pm » |
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I think that's pretty impossible to say mistre since there would be two rounds of cascading differences in pairing in between those two events.
Janzert
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mistre
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Re: 2013 World Championship
« Reply #40 on: Feb 12th, 2013, 8:21am » |
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Ok, what if the result stands but the performance ratings were not affected by the time out. Does the pairing change then and is it possible to figure it out?
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UMDRevan
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Re: 2013 World Championship
« Reply #41 on: Feb 12th, 2013, 10:01pm » |
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Hey everyone,
I just wanted to apologize about missing the WC Round 5 match between myself and crazyharry. I live in New England, so unfortunately I was without electricity for a few days due to the blizzard that swept through this past weekend.
Best luck to everyone for the remainder of the tournament.
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Janzert
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Re: 2013 World Championship
« Reply #42 on: Feb 13th, 2013, 12:18am » |
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on Feb 12th, 2013, 8:21am, mistre wrote:| Ok, what if the result stands but the performance ratings were not affected by the time out. Does the pairing change then and is it possible to figure it out? |
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So the number of wins and losses for each player at the end of that round would be the same as what actually occured? At that point I would guess that the change in rating would still be enough for the pairing to change but I'm not positive. Someone could figure that out for sure but it's beyond what I can easily check.
Once you find a change that does change the pairing it is going to cascade into a growing number of scenarios that would cause differing opponents by the time you reach round 6.
Janzert
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Fritzlein
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Re: 2013 World Championship
« Reply #43 on: Feb 13th, 2013, 7:42am » |
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on Feb 12th, 2013, 10:01pm, UMDRevan wrote:Hey everyone,
I just wanted to apologize about missing the WC Round 5 match between myself and crazyharry. I live in New England, so unfortunately I was without electricity for a few days due to the blizzard that swept through this past weekend.
Best luck to everyone for the remainder of the tournament. |
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Ouch; I'm sorry to hear about that. I hope that you and yours were able to stay warm and unharmed. I'm also pleased to learn that you were not in any way disenchanted with the tournament, and would have kept playing barring natural disaster.
I apologize that you were withdrawn rather than getting a Round 6 game. In the past most people who miss a game and don't swing by soon after to explain end up dropping out of the tournament (and usually out of Arimaa) completely. The rules are written as they are to minimize the chance of a player showing up at the scheduled time and waiting 15 minutes in vain. I'm glad this isn't the case with you, and I hope you understand that we must guard against the more typical case.
Thanks for participating!
--Fritz
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UMDRevan
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Re: 2013 World Championship
« Reply #44 on: Feb 14th, 2013, 8:23am » |
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on Feb 13th, 2013, 7:42am, Fritzlein wrote:
Ouch; I'm sorry to hear about that. I hope that you and yours were able to stay warm and unharmed. I'm also pleased to learn that you were not in any way disenchanted with the tournament, and would have kept playing barring natural disaster.
I apologize that you were withdrawn rather than getting a Round 6 game. In the past most people who miss a game and don't swing by soon after to explain end up dropping out of the tournament (and usually out of Arimaa) completely. The rules are written as they are to minimize the chance of a player showing up at the scheduled time and waiting 15 minutes in vain. I'm glad this isn't the case with you, and I hope you understand that we must guard against the more typical case.
Thanks for participating!
--Fritz
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My family is doing alright; we had to leave our house for a few days, but other than inconvenience, no harm was done.
And don't worry about withdrawing me from the tournament, it's understandable from your perspective.
In any case, hopefully by next year, I'll be able to play games a bit more competitively.
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