On Wed, 2007-06-20 at 06:44 -0700, terry mcintyre wrote: > 3-5 or 5-10 seconds is not a "relaxed" or "comfortable" pace for most > human players. Byo yomi > is usually set at 30 seconds per move. Canadian time controls might be > "20 moves in five minutes", .....
Who said the pace is 5-10 seconds? There is a liberal main time-control that makes the pace of the game much more relaxed and comfortable. This post addresses the logic behind why Fischer time with small increments is best for both humans and computers. I stated my opinion on this before, but I'm giving more substance in this message. Read on ... The only complaint I've heard so far against sudden death is that players are losing in dead won positions because they cannot physically negotiate the interface to make moves. The small increment is designed to address that situation. But there are other good reasons for it too. If you try to address every possible situation, you basically have to keep adding time somewhere and do it in a way that takes control away from the player by giving it to the time-control mechanism in a fairly rigid, unforgiving way. Fischer is the only way I am aware of that gives the players as much control over their own time-allocation as possible without trying to manage time FOR the players too much, and yet recognizes that games can vary significantly in total length. byo-yomi and other systems such as the Bronstein clock assumes the player cannot manage his time and tries to manage it for him. At least to one degree or another. Fischer is just a special case of the time control used in other games where you are given so much time for N moves, and then you are given additional time for another batch of moves (but accumulated time is not taken away from you.) Here is a typical time control NOT using Fischer time: 40 moves in 30 minutes followed by ... 20 moves in 10 minutes followed by ... 20 moves in 10 minutes ... etc Fischer is exactly the same system but the number of moves is either 0 or 1. 0 moves in 15 minutes 1 move in 10 seconds 1 move in 10 seconds ... etc. What makes either system so good is that you are never penalized for moving quickly and it's understood that if a game lasts longer you need more time. Fischer just does this with finer granularity and makes the bookkeeping easier. The right parameters for Fischer time is whatever allows the highest quality of games in the shortest actual game time and of course these values can only be estimated or guessed at. I have estimated (perhaps incorrectly but based on many comments from the group and for other reasons too) that the highest quality games will result from giving a player a large pool of time for HIM to manage rather than trying to manage it for him with a small pool and large increment. Some of you may have noticed that the strongest CGOS programs spend most of their time on just the first few moves. Any time control that prevents this by playing big-brother to the time-allocating decisions will weaken these programs. This even includes Fischer time with a large increment. The larger the increment, the more control the system is imposing on you. All of these considerations together would seem to indicate that it is best to let the human have as much control as possible by allocating a large pool of initial time and keeping the increment pretty small (just what is needed to comfortably play the ending and perhaps a small bit more.) I believe this will lead to the strongest possible play on average for a given amount of time per round of play. Although the relative difference in computers vs humans vary with the time control mechanism used, what applies to one still applies to the other. For instance sudden death weakens a computer program too (just not relative to a human) because a computer doesn't know whether a game will last a long time or not and can't predict when the game starts getting easy. So it's all about who controls your time - YOU, or the time-control system. Byo-yomi is particularly heavy-handed in this regard. It has a very artificial mechanism for controlling the pace of the endings. It's like the mafia in that it makes you an offer you shouldn't refuse - make your moves in 30 seconds or less, or else .... Of course it will forgive you up to a point but it's not true forgiveness, it forgives but it doesn't forget. - Don _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
