Hi Steve,
Steve B wrote:hi Robert
for you to say i can call my matches a championship is silly just as you calling your tournaments a World Championship is silly
ok, it looks like we won't come to an agreement (not for the first time!
)
Maybe as a closing point: we at .info do not take this term for so serious as you seem to do. Rest assured, that the admin would have never suggested this name for the tournament, if he would have known before, what discussions would arise!
for you to not recognize Eric Hallsworth as a leading authority on chess computers is not only silly but only shows exactly what i have been saying all along in this thread
if you guys never heard of him..well then he must not even exist
if he would take part in the discussions here, this could help to know him better! but if he is not interested or has no time, that's not our fault...
it was about 3 or 4 years ago (when i started collecting), when i first heard of him here on the net; before that time i was not so much interested in dedicated computers to investigate on the net. And at my first period of interest in dedicateds (1979-1987) there was no chance for me to hear from him! (or perhaps my English was not good enough, to be interested in reading English speaking magazines?
) I was just happy to have "CSS"!
2 years ago i had contacted him by email and even phone(!), as i wanted to order one single issue of SS (yes, i did!
) At that time, it was not intended to order single issues (that has changed as i saw yeasterday) and when i told him on the phone, that i only wanted one single issue, he said something like: "Oh boy, so much work for so few money!"
I was not sure, if it was meant as a joke or not, but at that moment i had a very bad feeling in my heart to give this man so much work for just a few GBP! (i'm not kidding here!)
I would have preferred, if he had said "No, that's not possible!"
I told him, if it's not acceptable for him, that i would be willing to withdraw my request, but he said, that it would be ok. Maybe he hoped to get another subscriber...
But i was really very much interested in this issue, so i ordered it...
Btw.: at this time there was also a problem with the payment as the only possible way for me was by credit card (here in Germany credit cards are not so popular as in the US, but i have one, as i relatively often buy shareware over the net)
The problem was, that his website, where you had to enter your credit card number and so on, was
not secured!
And this was too much risk for me (but we found another way! a little more complicated, but it worked)
And this did not change until today...
yes the SS is not free..but sometimes you get what you pay for
yes, but the question is: is it, what i want?
as to the coverage on dedicated computers
this changes issue by issue
the problem is, that there is too few to write about new dedicated computers; we all know this and have complained about it more than one time!
If he would write something about the older dedicateds (e.g. doing some clone testing; e.g. if the Modena really has a modified Dominator program; perhaps then you will be convinced?
) this would be much more of interest for me (and surely many other collectors)
If at least 50% of every(!) issue would cover dedicateds, then i would be thinking about subscribing...
as to the statistical information..yes he shows the total number of games played .. the Elo .the Standard Deviation +/- ..etc etc.
that's ok!
but he does not show this information every issue
only about every year or so
ok, not a big problem, but i wonder why?
for normal issues he only shows the computer(with clones on the same line) and the rating
you should pay for one issue..it is only 5 Euro
see above...
who knows Robert,,even you might learn something
that's for sure! I always like to learn something new!
i guess i could question the integrity of the .info ratings as well
of course! as you do not know most of the contributors, this is only reasonable!
Even the integrity of the SSDF list was doubted by many(!) people...
Only when you play all the games on your own, you know, what you have! But then anybody else could doubt
your integrity!
you never can be absolutely sure...
seriuosly though i do not question the integrity of the .info ratings ..i only question the need to start all over when the work has already been done before ..and as far as i know the SSDF lists are all online and free
so why not start with only the computers not rated by SSDF(ie ..the Citrine by way of example?)
i think you guys start all over from scratch because you either did not know all of the work was done before or you choose to ignor it
ey, Steve, i wonder, if you read my previous posts?
or was there something you could not understand?
I posted all the reasons!
And why shouldn't we do our own list? Even i for myself had been thinking about doing this with my own games! (about 1500 at the moment)
But then the idea of a general list came up in the .info forum, and so it all began!
Why should we only use computers not listed yet? That's not reasonable for statistical reasons as you have to have a basis, from where you can calculate the new ELOs. It is much better for accuracy, if the Citrine is playing against many (well known) opponents, but only against one or two new ones.
There aren't so many computers in our collections, that are not already covered by SSDF. Not every contributor has so many computers in his collection, as we do (i think, i have about 250, not to mention yours or Karsten Bauermeister's) to deliver such games!
And as i wrote before, we doubted some results of the SSDF, so we wanted to confirm or disprove them...
but i think it does not make sense to continue the discussion because it is not really a serious discussion at this point
ok, maybe that's the best option here!
We have many much more interesting topics to discuss here, do we?
agree not to agree again regards,
Robert
P.S.: I recently did a Modena-Dominator comparison...