David Kane wrote:
> ??? Ties are an impossibility for a large number of games and s****ts.
> Is it your claim that all of these contests are unfair?
if the players are effectively equal and the game doesn't reflect that,
then /to an extent/ they are clearly unfair because they do not reflect
the fact that the contest is even in their outcomes. That doesn't make
them broken to any real degree, but conversely a game which won't
necessarily have a decisive outcome isn't fundamentally broken either.
> In many other s****ts, ties are a theoretical possibility, but rare. In
> those
> where they are possible and not so rare (though still far rarer than
> chess), e.g. soccer, many have taken steps exactly as proposed for
> chess (alternate scoring that devalues ties).
And they haven't obviously worked that well, as soccer still has plenty
of draws. The problem is that pu****ng too hard for a win tends to have
you lose instead, with a commensurately greater penalty so at least as
much point in playing it safe. Moving to 3 point wins from two point
wins didn't really make much difference to soccer.
>> You still aren't
>> demonstrating that draws are bad or that most people don't like them.
>
> Much like we don't debate the merits of breathing oxygen. The very fact
> that
> chess' draw situation is an extreme compared with almost every other
> human contest should tell you something.
It tells us that similarly ranked chess players are fairly evenly
matched. This is not actually Big News, and a game that reflects that
is hardly broken. The "breathing oxygen" thing is such preposterous
exaggeration it looks to be the work of a straw-man manufacturing expert.
> According to Wikipedia "Conventional komi in most competitions is a
> half-integer....
> This is convenient and the prevailing usage for tournaments, since it
> rules out a tied
> game and rematches."
But of course the outcome of, and logistics of running, a tournament is
a different thing to the outcome of a game. You shouldn't assume they
mean the same thing.
> I suspect that even with your integer komi, draw rates are nowhere near
as
> high as the cancer it has become in high-level chess.
They're not as high, but in Chess it isn't a cancer, it's an aspect of
the game. if you don't like the game then play one you do like rather
that bugger about with metagaming aspects that aren't really much to do
with the fundamental game underneath.
For a game with "cancer" that you seem to think breaks it, Chess is
*remarkably* popular! The more you complain it's broken, the more its
enduring popularity at all levels demonstrates it isn't.
> You sound like a Go enthusiast trying to kill off chess.
I do? I prefer Go to Chess, but I still like Chess. It does different
things well, and I don't think it needs changing.
Pete.
--
Peter Clinch Medical Physics IT Officer
Tel 44 1382 660111 ext. 33637 Univ. of Dundee, Ninewells Hospital
Fax 44 1382 640177 Dundee DD1 9SY Scotland UK
net p.j.clinch@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~pjclinch/
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