Life In 19x19

Please vote at least twice: once in the upper portion for your opinion of how to resolve the issue, and once in the lower portion to tell us where you live. ( You can vote multiple times in the upper portion if you find multiple solutions to be acceptable. )

I was not going to vote, having expressed my views in the discussion that the fault lies with the tournament organizers and, to some extent, KGS. So my vote would have been that the organizers lose. However, being forced to make a choice can be informative, so I came up with an option.

My choice is to resume the tournament, under different conditions. Do not let KGS handle the time controls, since they do a crappy job of dealing with netlag. Instead, make the proctors responsible for keeping and recording time. This is doable with only one tournament game going on at one location at any time.

Since the players are not at fault but the tournament conditions were, probably the fairest thing would be to declare the game without result and let the players have a rematch under the new conditions.

Do not use KGS in the future.

Another option is to void the entire tournament altogether, and make a new one later with more explicit rules and a better server.

Shame my AGA membership expired or I could tick both EGF and AGA

Bill Spight wrote:I was not going to vote, having expressed my views in the discussion that the fault lies with the tournament organizers and, to some extent, KGS. So my vote would have been that the organizers lose. However, being forced to make a choice can be informative, so I came up with an option...

So it was you who voted for the dotted line.

I have had situations where at least KGS, IGS, Tygem and Wbaduk all showed signs of lag, due to defective local network conditions. None of them compensated. I am not sure they should compensate, though, but rather warn when a round-trip latency exceeds some threshold. Some video conference software does this. In the meantime, I like Bill's two-proctor suggestion

Joaz Banbeck wrote:

Bill Spight wrote:I was not going to vote, having expressed my views in the discussion that the fault lies with the tournament organizers and, to some extent, KGS. So my vote would have been that the organizers lose. However, being forced to make a choice can be informative, so I came up with an option...

So it was you who voted for the dotted line.

Under an assumed name.

It baffles me why there are other options except the 2nd and 3rd, but maybe that's just me. Especially, giving Eric the win in a clearly lost game, 10 moves before filling dame, like seriously? The proctor confirms the lag issue and the organizers failed to consider such an event. Is this a game between two random DDK or between professionals?

dsatkas wrote:Especially, giving Eric the win in a clearly lost game, 10 moves before filling dame, like seriously?

It’s not a case that he “clearly lost”. If you take the time settings literally, he “clearly won” on time. On KGS, if you play a ranked game and are ahead on board, losing on time still brings down your rank.

But this tournament is not the same as the KGS ranking system, so it can have different rules. But those different rules were not specified, hence the ambiguity toward what should be done.

Kirby wrote:

dsatkas wrote:Especially, giving Eric the win in a clearly lost game, 10 moves before filling dame, like seriously?

It’s not a case that he “clearly lost”. If you take the time settings literally, he “clearly won” on time.

In the first game I have ever played in a tournament, I kept three quarters of the board worth of my opponent's stones dead and lost on time.
Whether KGS should be trusted with keeping time is a completely different issue than whether losing a 'clearly' won game (whatever that means in general) on time should be appealable.

dsatkas wrote:It baffles me why there are other options except the 2nd and 3rd, but maybe that's just me. Especially, giving Eric the win in a clearly lost game, 10 moves before filling dame, like seriously? The proctor confirms the lag issue and the organizers failed to consider such an event. Is this a game between two random DDK or between professionals?

By comparison with games that have more complicated rules, go is fortunate that rulings are rarely necessary. That's good, but the downside is that referees, directors, and organizers are not always prepared to issue rulings and/or do not anticipate potential problems. I was trained as a contract bridge director, a game with complicated rules such that every large tournament requires an appeals committee. I always ask what can go wrong and how can we deal with it?

It appears that the question of netlag was not explicitly addressed in any tournament rules. If so, that is unfortunate. However, the organizers are professionals and are giving the situation the serious deliberation it deserves, and whatever decision they reach will be a reasoned one. It is by no means necessary that a winner and loser be declared for this particular game.

yakcyll wrote: In the first game I have ever played in a tournament, I kept three quarters of the board worth of my opponent's stones dead and lost on time.

I’ve lost a “won” game, too, in a tournament. It is very frustrating, but a part of the game.

I agree with you that the question of whether KGS can be trusted to keep time is an interesting question, and probably, one that wasn’t clarified before the tournament started.

The rules exist to support the game, not the other way around. When all else fails, remember that we are playing Go, not "who has the better Internet connection."

This isn't some weird exotic case where shenanigans were had, this is just internet lag. Technical issues like internet lag or a faulty clock should not decide games.

If we can't 100%:ly trust the proctors, then voiding and rematch is the best option, because other options either favor Mateusz or Eric imo while this is probably most neutral in relation to whether it was lag or not and who deserves the win. Currently the most popular poll result of resuming the game from where it left off would favor Mateusz in a case that he actually was lost in thought and actually lost on time.

As to what are the right things to do to avoid this in future. Local time keeping could help on that to some extent. Either a software that registers the plays timestamps locally also or so would provide proof if we can trust that the local data is not hacked. So maybe when the server registers each move on the server, they would also be sent the timestamp the local computer recorded and store that too (but maybe without affecting the actual servers time keeping clock though). I guess this is not the case on any online go server. I have heard the IGS at least records timestamps to the kifu's, but I haven't checked into that.

Also there could be a web stream streaming video of the player playing on his computer.

This tournament has been a good thing for the western go and I hope that this setback won't discourage organizers despite getting some tough feedback.

What would happen if they ask the players how to solve this? I think Eric Liu is highly embarrassed with the whole situation and will gladly accept any reasonable offer, such as playing a new game or continuing from where Mateusz allegedly left it.