Rules for Online Competition

[gowan]

It is impossible to list all possible interruptions, there will always be spontaneous occurrences that had not been planned for. For example, there could be power outages for one player and not the other, weather conditions that affect internet connections, or even denial of service hacks on behalf of one of the players. With these unpredictable events a referee would need to be available on short notice, possibly even stopping play for longer than five or ten minutes. In-person tournaments also have interruptions such as storms, earthquakes, or even nuclear bomb attacks. All these interruptions have to be handled by the referee.

[pwaldron]

I must confess I'm a little surprised the pros themselves haven't been a little more active dealing with these questions. Recalling John Fairbairn's detailing the history of Japanese professional go in the 20th century, it was very much the pros having to do the heavy lifting to find sponsorship and financial support or having paid administrators instead. The Western pros are going to have to get used to the idea of doing the same if they want to make professional go a serious career beyond just fee-for-lessons. Perhaps, for example, they might take a share of their recent prize pool and hire a programmer to modify the go server to handle net lag. Or they might look at hiring professional proctors to monitor online games.