Updates

Haven't updated in a while. Sorry about that. I'm sitting in Komatsu Airport right now, and I have a nice long wait before my plane, so I will fill in the last few days.

On Wednesday, after getting a nice win vs. Shredder, Rondo played Darmenios. This was one of the newer programs, so I wasn't too worried. The game ended rather predictably with a win after not too long.

On Wednesday night, instead of having another round in the software championship, we played the blitz tournament. I have heard that the blitz is pretty crazy, really testing your nerves. Each game is played with 7 minutes for each side to make all their moves, which includes entering the opponent's move on the GUI, waiting for the engine's move, playing it on the board, and then hitting the clock. I played a test game with Dariusz, author of Darmenios, just to get used to the fast time controls. It was quite fun, and of course very quick. My hand on the mouse was already a bit sweaty from just the one game.

The tournament didn't go all that well for Rondo, for a few reasons. In the first few games, I had set the time on the GUI to take a few seconds off the clock each move, to try and match the real game clock. The problem with this is that the GUI clock quickly ran down to 0 seconds, while the game clock still had several minutes. This caused Rondo to move instantly every move, with hardly any thinking time at all. I noticed this in the game against Jonny, where Jonny pulled off a nice win. If the time control had been set to something else, perhaps Rondo could have held a draw, but if you're playing instantly, it's almost certain that you will lose. Except if you get very lucky, like in the first round. Rondo played Rybka, and it got into a losing endgame position (perhaps related to moving instantly--I don't remember). Rondo said it would be checkmated soon, but of course you always keep playing in blitz--anything can happen. And it did--when there were 12 moves to go, Rybka's connection to its remote machine dropped, and there wasn't any output coming. Hans (the Rybka operator) tried frantically to load an engine on his laptop to play locally. Luckily, it was taking a rather long time to load, and Rybka's clock hit 0. A win for Rondo! Not too bad.

Trying to counteract this instant-move problem, I took the advice of Rondo's book author and set the time to 1+1 (one minute, plus one second added to the clock after each move). The idea is to not try and match the game clock, but have a more or less constant time for each move (a little over a second). This seemed to work at first, until some of the games that lasted a bit longer. Rondo was moving too slow, and eventually lost on time. It didn't help that I was running on a remote desktop. For each move, I had to enter it over a very slow network connection. Rondo lost three games on time in total, and ended up with 4.5/9 for the blitz. Not that great, I guess, but I wasn't taking the results of the tournament too seriously. It was definitely a lot of fun though.

The blitz tournament, while fun, was a bit stressful and it was giving me a headache. I went out for a beer with the Germans from the tournament--Stefan, Johannes, and Christian. I felt a special bond with them due to my German heritage, haha. We ate a small dinner at a small restaurant, while a few drunk Japanese people talked loudly next to us at the bar.

The next day, Rondo faced Thinker. It was one of the opponents I was a bit worried about. It's quite strong, and this being it's first tournament, it was a bit of an unknown. The book authors, Anson Williams and Nelson Hernandez, were also cause for concern. Rondo was out of book in position where Thinker had lots of play, and it was soon faced with Thinker's e4 and Nxf7, moves that forced Rondo into a line without many options. Since Rondo needed to win this game to stay in the lead with Rybka, I was getting a bit nervous. The scores started to go negative, and then I was really just hoping for a draw. Unfortunately, they kept going down, and Thinker came out victorious. Very well played by Thinker, and congratulations for giving Rondo it's only loss in this tournament.

In the software, there were two rounds that day. Rondo first played Pandix. I was hoping to get some revenge for its draw in the open tournament. Pandix had a bad move in its opening book, and Rondo was happy quite early. Rondo won the game, though it wasn't a great fight. Next up was Jonny. Johannes was quite unhappy with several of his program's moves early on (and he's a very strong chess player, so I believe him). The position was quite closed though--no pawns were exchanged for a very long time. Rondo didn't see a way to make progress, so it just shuffled its pieces around for a very long time. After 50 moves without progress, Rondo knew that it had to make a pawn move to avoid a draw. So it did. But again, after that, it didn't see any way to break through, so kept shuffling for another 50 moves. I would have offered a draw, but Rondo thought it was ahead, and it was a won position for black anyways. After those 50 moves, it was forced to make a move that actually broke through. Rondo didn't quite like it, but it was better than a draw. Soon after, Rondo was able to break down Jonny. Johannes was about to resign, but we figured we would keep playing, since it's possible we could set a record for the longest game played in a chess championship. I was concerned that the Fritz GUI I was using wouldn't be able to handle so many moves. The game eventually ended at move 208, when Fritz went on the fritz and gave a bogus move. Johannes gracefully resigned (though the game was definitely lost for Jonny).

On Friday, Rondo played Junior, the last round of the WCCC. It was quite unlikely now for Rondo to win, so I was not quite as concerned with the results. Junior pulled off a draw it turns out. Meanwhile Rybka defeated Shredder, so it meant that Rybka was once again world champion. Rondo did end up with 2nd place though.

The next two rounds in the software were against Junior again and Shredder. Junior managed to get another draw (the third out of all three games we played in Japan), in a position that Rondo probably should've won. Against Shredder, the roles were reversed: Rondo got a draw in a position that it probably should've lost. This meant that Rondo ended the software with 6.5/8 points.

That night, the Germans and the honorary German (me) went out for dinner once again. We went to a really awesome restaurant that they had been to earlier in the week. I think it was called "Sizzle", as that was written everywhere. Each table has a big grill built into the table. When you get there, they fire up the grill and give you a couple of spatulas. Each dish you buy is basically a bowl with a bunch of raw ingredients that you cook yourself. The food was really good, the bowls were basically meat, egg, and vegetables. There was also plenty of beer to be drank. We ate up all the food and had a pretty long discussion on various computer chess topics. I then walked back to the hotel (after another pretty long conversation with Johannes and Christian outside their hotel). A pretty long walk, but I guess I worked off some of the beer calories I just had.

There was one more round on Saturday, but Rondo had a bye--there were an odd number of participants, so one player doesn't play a game each round. I still came to the tournament hall near the end of the last round (after sleeping in!!!) to check on the result, particularly the game Shredder - Junior. Shredder was a half point behind Rondo, but had one more round to play. If it beat Junior, it would get 1st, if it lost, Rondo would get 1st, and if a draw, we would have a playoff. Unfortunately, when I showed up to the tournament hall, Shredder looked like it was going to win, and indeed soon did.

I at least got the chance to walk around town, take a lot of pictures, and do a little bit of shopping for presents for the family. The closing ceremony was at 4pm that day, so I had plenty of time. After buying some stuff, walking all the way back to the hotel to drop it off, and walking all the way back to the hall, I was ready for some lunch. I had a nice ham and cheese sandwich while sitting out on the patio in the gorgeous weather. I noticed a couple other chess guys out there, so I joined them. The group slowly grew until there were 12 or so people sitting outside in a circle, waiting for 4pm. A nice little gathering.

The closing ceremony was a bit of fun, though with some tedious speeches from Jaap van der Herik (tournament director) and David Levy (president of ICGA). Rondo got two silver medals (or ceramics, to be more realistic), with two little presents to boot (that I'm pretty sure are hand painted cups). The ICGA kindly paid for ONE drink for everyone, so I had a beer and stood outside talking to a few people, mainly David Fotland and Richard Segal, a couple of Go programmers. At 6pm there was a dinner for all participants at a Japanese restaurant, so the 50 or so people there all walked in a convoy the few blocks to the restaurant.

The restaurant was rather traditional, I guess. Mostly seafood, and strange seafood at that (Anyone hungry for Salted Squid Guts with Squid's Ink?). After a very long wait (the restaurant was quite small, and brought the dishes out one-by-one, I had a decent and somewhat normal meal, though it was very small. Stefan, the programmer of Shredder, was still pretty hungry after the meal. Most people had already left to go home, but the Germans decided to have a little more food (and beer) at Sizzle. We were able to order just a couple of dishes and have a sort of half-meal and another beer. We stayed there chatting until eventually the restaurant closed.

I wished my new German friends a fond farewell, knowing that we would meet again sometime soon. And one last long walk back to the hotel.

Sunday morning (today!) I slept in again, and woke up in time to pack up all my stuff. I had really crammed all my stuff in my bags for the trip over, in order to avoid checking any luggage. I hadn't thought that I might be coming back with a bunch more crap. Somehow I was able to stuff it all in my bags, still not needing to check any luggage. Just hoping now that I don't need to unpack it all at the airport for security.

Checked out of the hotel at 10:30, and walked to the bus station to catch the Airport Rimousine (yes, really--there will be a picture posted soon). After a bunch of walking around looking for an ATM, I found that the ATMs there wouldn't accept my cards. I asked a lady at the tourist information center what to do, and she couldn't really think of anything. She then quietly slipped me a 1000 yen bill (around 12 dollars) on the desk, saying that it was a secret--she wasn't supposed to do that. It really surprised me--how very nice. I kept telling her how much I appreciated it, but it was clear that she wanted me to stop, lest somebody notice and ask her what was happening--it was secret after all. After then waiting a very long time for the rimousine, I headed to Komatsu Airport on my way home. And here I am, with still a few more hours to go before my flight. I'll be in Tokyo at around 9PM, and then will head out tomorrow at 11AM, getting back to Austin on Monday about 5PM. See you then.