CEGT - what is it?

[Heinz van Kempen]

Hi all,

yesterday I posted an invitation in CCC to register to the CEGT Forum and we are
happy that so many known authors, experts and enthusiasts already registered and
we are looking forward to discussion and proposals. We also hope that more will
come to support new ideas and give additional ones.

Anyway I want to mention that it is never easy to keep even a smaller forum
friendly and to avoid the known problems. So over the time there will be an open
section for all where proposals can be made for projects and tournaments and
where critics can be uttered and another section (testers only) where testers
can do their work without pressure from outside.

For your information about the history of CEGT.

Any tester knows how hard it is to collect a statistically relevant amount of
games with longer time control when you test alone, even when owning two, three
or four machines. Most go to Blitz and faster time controls then, so that we
have tons of such tournaments, so many that it is practically impossible to
follow them all and interest in all of them decreased over the past years, what
of course is also frustrating for the testers.

So some years ago I had a dream. I thought: "Why not combine efforts, ideas and
hardware from testers, why not work together with other sympathetic testers?
This must be fun and give much better and more reliable results."

So I posted this idea in Winboard Forum (some of you will remember) and got
immmediate support from Volker Pittlik, Igor Gorelikov, Olivier Deville, just to
mention the first ones. Over the time even engine authors helped with testing.
Thomas Mayer, Will Singleton, Brian Richardson, Volker Annuss come to my mind.
Bryan Hoffmann also helped with advice and benchmarks. AEGT (Amateur Engine
Grande Tournament) was formed and due to the persistent help of Chris Tatham,
Charles Smith and many others it ran for some years (later directed by Igor
Gorelikov whom I proposed). Overall it was a very nice time, with occasional
conflicts which are quite normal in a bigger team (Uschi wrote an intersting
article about group dynamics in the old forum with the essence that performance
and feeling well in a team usually decreases when this team grows too big).
Another problem we faced was the lack of feedback we know from all fora, hurting
of course the long-time motivation of testers.

Christian Koch whom I know for around 25 years already personally then thought
that it would be better to test not only amateur engines, but all including the
commercials to give more interesting tournaments. He proposed this to me and we
both founded CEGT (Chess Engines Grande Tournament). First we still continued
also to test in AEGT, then we needed all the hardware for CEGT. Over the time
more testers like Johan Havegheer and Michael Koppel supported us with machines.
We profited a lot from Michael?s statistic tools and Uschi started to learn
about graphics to improve the website and moreover is our good fairy helping
whenever conflicts arise. Some months ago there was a big rush to CEGT becoming
more and more popular.

There were some problems involved with this. CEGT is combined too much to my
name, so good known testers maybe do not get the appreciation they deserve from
outside the team. I always wanted to demonstrate that we are a team and I also
started to give all CEGT stats, downloads, etc. away and this also decreased my
own workload for a short while.

A split soon happened and the reasons where I could anyway only give my personal
views will not be discussed here from my side.

Anyway you see that after the shock CEGT is still alive and kicking, enthusiasm
from testers is not destroyed.

So my request would be to receive support with ideas, proposals, testing, etc., because there is a lot what can be done with more people and supporters.

Best Regards
Heinz