my biased $0.02: i don't think that the point is to call it even. someone's got to win, and everyone else has to come in <= 2nd place. moreover, pretending as if this is the kind of contest that can be won with money (or hardware) alone is just sour grapes.
one way to make this a contest about algorithms would be to require everyone's code to run on identical hardware under the identical operating system. how much fun would that be? not very much at all. imagine that you're used to being able to fit a very frequently-accessed table entirely in ram. in fact, many of your other data structures and code flow are built around the fact that it fits entirely in ram on your box. then imagine that the contest hardware has less ram and that you get to spend 90% of your "thinking time" watching the machine swap, or rewrite all of your code. no thanks. sure, this is the opposite of the problem that is being described -- instead of it being a sad story for the guy who has tiny hardware, it's a sad story for the guy who has access to better hardware. in neither case is it a really sad story, however. it's just that arbitrary limits always cause problems for somebody. the *only* time where hardware could really become an issue is if everyone competing is using algorithms all of which scale at roughly the same rate, all of which parallelize at roughly the same rate, etc. talk about a boring contest! this isn't an asymptotic problem requiring an algorithmic solution. this is a fixed-size board requiring a "best of show" answer. whoever gets there, however they get there, deserves to win, as long as the machines are choosing their own moves. s. _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
