Rémi Coulom wrote:
Don Dailey wrote:
I also feel for the Mac people and also people that have built
programs that run on networks of workstations or other potential
supercomputer programs that would not be able to participate. - Don
Although I am one of the participants with access to non-conventional
computational power, I must say I like the idea of uniform-platform
tournaments. Uniform platform allows to avoid comments such as "that
program won because it had better hardware", or the frustration of the
poor participants that don't have access to big hardware.
Uniform platform tournaments have their place definitely. They
basically isolate programmer skill so they can serve well as contests of
pure programming skill where the strength of the contestants are of
secondary importance. It would be like a Nascar race, where all the
drivers were given the same car off a dealers lot to see who the best
driver is.
However, by their nature they are exclusionary. A uniform platform
tournament is almost certainly going to reward windows programmers.
Although you could have such a tournament for any platform, the
reality is such that most platforms would be impractical. Can you
imagine having a uniform platform DOS tournament? Most people don't
care about pure DOS programs.
I feel that "anything goes" tournaments are far more prestigious and far
more compatible with the (unstated?) goal of trying to produce the
strongest possible mechanical player. Can you imagine, for
instance, a computer world chess championship that would not allow
Hydra, Deep Blue or would exclude anything that happened to have
superior technology in it?
- Don
I like tournaments such as the Computer Olympiad that allow anything,
too. It is particularly cool to meet participants such as Hideki who
uses a network of playstations. But it does not mean that
uniform-platform is evil. It is a different kind of tournament format,
that also has its qualities.
Nick is in a better position to comment about this, but I also suppose
that when a sponsor such as Toshiba provides hardware and prizes, it
may not be very happy to see a program win with non-Toshiba hardware.
Rémi
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