Can We Sic the Alinskyites on DGT?
Monday, January 19, 2015 at 10:36PM The Alinskyite approach to politics is one I find reprehensible, but as the DGT people absolutely refuse to change their stupid system for recording results, no matter how many erroneous game scores get published, maybe it's time for a campaign of sustained attention and ridicule in the hopes of getting them to make a change.
I haven't ranted on this for a while, so this might be new for some of you. Here's the deal: on the DGT sensory boards, results are recorded by putting the kings on two of the four central squares (d4, e4, d5 and e5). If White wins, the kings go on white squares. If Black wins, then the kings goes on the black squares and if it's a draw, one of each. It sounds simple and elegant, but problems arise when one or both kings was adjacent to a central square prior to the game's final move. The game that provoked this latest rant was the round 8 game from Wijk aan Zee between Baadur Jobava and Magnus Carlsen. Carlsen's last move was 50...Kf6-f5. Jobava resigned, and the arbiter put Carlsen's king on e5 and Jobava's on d4. That takes care of the result, but it creates a problem: Black's last move now shows up as 50...Kf6-e5. This sort of error has happened hundreds if not thousands of times in the approximately two decades during which DGT boards have been in use.
Is there a solution? Sure. If I understand the way the boards function, the arbiter could have put White's king on d4 first and only then put Carlsen's king on e5, and that would have taken care of it. This would require arbiters to pay attention, but good luck with that. They've been making this sort of mistake for 20 years, so it would require a naively optimistic theory of human nature to suppose that things are going to change. Moreover, there are other ways things can go wrong. Suppose Jobava's king had been on d3 in the final position. Then if the arbiter had first put Jobava's king on d4 and then Carlsen's on e5, the game score would still have been corrupted, this time by reading 50...Kf5 51.Kd4 and White resigns. Either way would fail. Again, there is a solution: all that matters in this case is that the kings are on dark squares; it doesn't matter which king is on which dark square. So the right way would be to put White's king on e5 and Black's king on d4 - in either order - and the problem would be solved. Again, that requires an attentive and properly trained arbiter (and in blitz tournaments, attentive and properly trained players).
That is simply bad engineering. If someone designs a system that users consistently goof up - for year after year! - a wise designer acknowledges the problem and tries to make the misused feature more user-friendly. Alas, rather than trying to foolproof the mechanism DGT has set things up in such a way that an error is not only possible but even pretty likely. It's clear that they don't care about such things, but we as chess fans ought to care - it's the history of our game that is being corrupted. In a minor way, yes, but why should it be corrupted at all, especially when a fix is so easy? There are probably many easy fixes, but how about a simple three-position switch on the side of the board, along with a button to confirm the result?
So let's all drop them an email (info@dgtprojects.com) letting them know how much we appreciate their fine work in distorting game scores everywhere. Are there any rich readers out there able to buy the company and fire the people that refuse to fix the problem? Incidentally, it's not just a matter of calming the annoyed purists out there. It creates havoc with unsuspecting chess fans watching corrupted online transmissions, and wastes a lot of man-hours when people like Mark Crowther of TWIC and others have to find and fix these errors in the databases. (In TWIC 1054, released earlier today, the Carlsen game was wrong. Let's say he changes this and puts out a revised edition of TWIC 1054. There are hundreds if not thousands of people who download the weekly issues and collect them into a big database. Those who downloaded the original edition will have to delete the previous edition from the bigger database, which takes a while, then download the new version and move that into the bigger database. Something similar goes for ChessBase and other database makers and the users that download them.) In short, the only people who "win" are the lazy and unconcerned people at DGT who just want chess players' money and don't give a damn about the game itself. It's a pity they don't have any competitors, but maybe if enough people complain and waste their time they'll do something other than blame the arbiters. (Who do deserve some blame as well.)
Reader Comments (5)
The problem, of course, is that DGT has a de facto monopoly and has no reason to change. Unless there is some way to hit them in the wallet, I don't see it happening because it takes money to redesign a product; money the owners would prefer to keep in their own pockets. Remember how bad Windows was for so long because Microsoft had a monopoly? Same thing but smaller scale with DGT.
Unlike the Windows situation, there is a court of last resort: FIDE (and maybe some of the larger nation federations). Of course, the idea that FIDE would do anything even semi-intelligent is pretty laughable. If FIDE cared and threatened to ban the use of their boards unless the problem got fixed, the DGT folks would fall all over themselves to solve the problem. Short of something like that happening, I doubt the good folks at DGT will do anything. My $0.02 (USD).
I don't believe in hardware changes, besides, there are thousand of DGT boards around the world and such change wouldn't affect them. Also, players are used to setting kings, so having a few new boards besides old one will mean they have to change their habits only for some boards. My experience as an arbiter of rapid tournaments suggests this will cause a bunch of missed results.
I think the realistic solution is to improve the software. This has the advantage of being much cheaper for the company and will also fix the problem with existing boards. I believe in 99% of cases proper final moves can be detected by very basic heuristics. It is possible to detect that the last board change was setting the kings in final position and revert to previous move already recorded (if Ke6-f5 was recorded and the next change is to set the king, revert Ke6-e5 and restore Ke6-f5).
There are probably some ambiguous positions, so the errors will still happen sometimes, but they also happen in other parts of the game - we have to accept electronic boards won't be perfect, as sometimes it is not possible to detect move sequence with 100% confidence.
That it mean the problem is likely to be solved? My experience with current DGT software (LiveChess, replacing horrendous Toma) makes me pessimistic. The software is more stable but the last move handling become worse. If I recall correctly, Toma at least didn't add *incorrect* king moves at the end of the game. LiveChess does, so it is quite common in a large tournament to have 3-5 incorrect king moves in PGN per round.
Often even the arbiter is not to blame for such a mistake. Countless of times I've seen players shaking hands and grabbing the kings themselves. Further support for the notion that we need a different way to settle scores.
"The Alinskyite approach to politics is one I find reprehensible"<--one of the greatest Civil Rights activists of all time was reprehensible? Belated Happy MLK Day to you, Dennis Monokroussos. Dr King copied and used much of Alinsky's approach.
[DM: From what I understand of Alinsky, I would disagree. But suppose I'm wrong, what then? The inference you drew simply doesn't follow from the premise I supplied. To disagree with someone's methods does not necessarily imply disagreeing with their aims or casting any general aspersions on that individual. A person can find MLK Jr. a courageous advocate for civil rights (and I do) without accepting everything about him. Conversely, even very bad people are right about some things. If Hitler believed that 2 plus 2 is equal to 4, we shouldn't therefore construct a new arithmetic.]
I do wonder if there's a patent (or something) preventing potential competitors from selling a better product.
Assuming that this is fixable by a software update, it seems to me the following (offhand) design would be unambiguous (and surely simpler or less error-prone designs exist):
* White wins: play white king takes black king
* Black wins: play black king takes white king
* Draw: exchange king locations
[DM: Clever!]