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.)