> Do you claim it's possible to avoid time losses by better coding? If so, > I'm very interested in what you have in mind. Measuring lag isn't the > answer: if your opponent is willing to play 2500 moves and you can make at > most 2 per second because of lag, then you will lose no matter what you do.
in a tournament setting, you could always drop a binary of your code onto a local network with two machines for each game being played at any one time. i.e. reduce the lag to as near zero as possible by removing the network-wise distance between the binaries involved. this doesn't work in a kgs setting unless your machines are in the same machine room as the kgs machine, but it does work in other tournament settings. from the server's point of view, if i ask you what move you want to make, and it takes 0.5s for you to respond, it seems reasonable to me that since i (as the server) had to wait 0.5s for your response, i should remove 0.5s from your clock. now, if i know my lag to you (and this is easy enough for me to find out), and i can assume that your lag to me is the same (which isn't that terrible of an assumption, as simplified as it is), then i can add back double whatever my lag to you is to your clock after each move. i can do this calculation and measurement *independently* of you making moves, so if you suddenly start gaining lag, i'll notice, and likely i'll notice at a time different from (and prior to) when you are making a move. can you eat my pings and delay their responses? yes. but what kind of sociopath would do such a thing among programs none of which is better than a human on a big board? i.e. a much more obvious way to cheat would be to let a human play for the bot, yet nobody here worries much about that. also, if everyone involved were part of a private NTP network, the clocks would all agree, and if it were encrypted correctly, it'd be silly for anyone to bother hacking. then lag could be calculated quite exactly by the server. s. _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
