an ordinary chessplayer wrote on 12/19/22 at 00:56:38:
trw wrote on 12/18/22 at 16:28:14:
There is no world where an engine beats a centaur; that has never happened and never will happen. However, many decisive games are lost due to human errors.
I don't understand these two statements together. To my way of thinking, the second statement contradicts the absolutist first statement.
One minor detail about centaur play is that technically all correspondence games with any engine input whatsoever are human+engine games. The balance can range from one extreme "the human does almost everything with the engine doing blunder-checking" to the other extreme "the human bookkeeper plays the top engine move every time". How many errors the human introduces is a function of the human's strength and the balance of their contribution. So I think the word never (twice) in the above quote needs some qualifications.
Jonathan Tait wrote on 12/18/22 at 09:17:25:
Stockfish alone will still draw with the centaur – and may even win if the human part goes wrong. Indeed, the crucial WC game (Edwards-Michálek) was lost because the human did something stupid (left his knight en prise).
Even if the human is only doing bookkeeping, the knight can be left en prise. In a similar way, move-typos can creep into chess books and magazines even though all the moves are created using a chess GUI. Actually, the more one relies on technology to produce the answer, the harder it becomes (both psychologically and practically) to detect when the human's process has introduced an error.
Fair points. I accept the correction.
The point is that in many cases engines begin shuffling with no plan and no human will lose to such a shuffling engine if he / she can also access an engine.
As for the en prise issue, this can even be a software issue. I lost a game when ICCF had just implemented conditional moves and programmed them incorrectly. It hung my rook. ICCF looked into it and admitted I was right and that I had not hung my rook but by using conditional moves that I had agreed to the programmer's tool and accepted all responsibility for the tool's misprogramming
.
In most cases, hanging of a piece is just either A) transposing the move order or B) having the wrong position ever so slightly in your analysis.
I can say in over 1000 competitive correspondence games that I have committed A once and B once and been the recipient of both A & B one time as well. So "5 games" decisive due to these unforced errors in over 1000 games is not a large number.
What happens far far more often is DMD / time forfeits and is the reason players play slow.
For example, player called John Smith enters a new tournament. John quickly draws his first two games of 13 games. John then time forfeits a game and while the TD is investigating John time forfeits two more games. John has 3 losses and 2 draws. What is the TD to do with the remaining 8 games when he finds out John is dead?
1) Have a player replace them who will most likely hold all 8 games to a draw.
2) Withdraw John and award wins to the 8 remaining games thereby disadvantaging the two players who quickly drew him.
3) Withdraw John and award draws to the 8 remaining games thereby advantaging the 3 people who got time forfeits.
4) Annul all of John's results and remove him from the tournament.
5) Some other solution.
1&2 are the methods that ICCF has chosen (almost at random whether they will implement method 1 or 2). One can argue all day what is most fair and probably it is method 4. However, if you implement method 4 then the ICCF draw rate would go from approximately ~85% to 95%. But this DMD / time forfeit scenario is by and away the most common and comes up in just about every tournament.
The situation is exactly what you imagine; not just morbid but players are punished for playing quickly so even when a draw is *known* then they are encouraged to drag it out for months or often even years.
This situation isn't that different when a player withdraws ala Bock in WCC 32 where the players who drew him early are penalized.
Jonathan Tait wrote on 12/05/22 at 16:24:17:
mattchess wrote on 12/03/22 at 19:43:31:
"Out of the 136 games played in the 32nd World Correspondence Chess Championship, 119 were draws. What’s more, when games are decisive, this is sometimes because of human error.
I tweeted about this...
"Out of the 136 games played (...) 119 were draws." – Except that Bock withdrew, so all his "losses" can be discounted; similarly Neto-Pessoa where Black "resigned" a level position. So out of 119 real results, only *three* were decisive.
Anyways, I don't think the WCC will ever go away or be unimportant but it will continue to be high draws. I think that you will see correspondence become more just a hobby for those not willing to treat it competitively. Even now, most of the ICCF Friendly matches where I play board 1 through 10 are usually decided by those players rated under 1800 who do not even use engines at all.
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