Databases - what is allowed?

For those with a poor vocabulary (like me):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

So he/she is either an extremely skilled chess player or an extremely skilled cheater?  Or both?  Obviously, you're jumping to a conclusion about the person introducing the move to the engine.  I'm not saying you're wrong, only that it probably can't be proved.  Talk about a slippery slope.

Clearly you've never been to an NFL game, where the home team gets a significant advantage, due to the croud noise interefering with the snap call of the opposing QB.

LOL the fear of losing to someone who is cheating.. motivates others to use Databases... and computers. its like trying to stop killing with more killing.. stupid. if someone is obviously cheating... which  is easy to spot. then u have to realize that your playing a Machine.. its not impossible to defeat these Machines.

greatest point of all is there is no machine that is the current World champion... rybka and fritz both get destroyed by gms.

Ofcourse im not saying u gotta become a gm.. to avoid losing to machines.. im just saying the odd chance of finding a cheater...and losing to them is not going to ever stop.

The Sun also revolves around the Earth.

LOL.

In fact, as GM Larry Kaufman (on the Rybka development team) has pointed out, Rybka has gotten so strong she has to give at least pawn odds to GM's for them to have a fighting chance against her.

It's sort of like Paul Morphey in his prime -- only the gap will only get wider.

If the number 1 seeds had advanced to the Super Bowl with >50% rate that would be phenomenal, given it's several games to win. You should instead look at what the winning percentage is in the playoffs for the home field team.

Sure sure sure, ok, I am just pointing out that a 50% number of the number one seed would be quite incredible, and would point to a MASSIVE home field advantage. Or more likely it would point to the #1 seed just being that good.

That being said, I don't think if it really did rattle them that you would ever hear them _admit_ that.

The claim that NFL home field advantage is more significant than DB use is almost as ridiculous as the claim that rybka and fritz lose to GMs consistently. (Okay, GMs can win on extreme rarities, with wacky time controls, or if the Rybka and Fritz are being run on poor-performing hardware). However, both of these claims are significantly more ridiculous than the claim that the sun revolves around the earth, which, according to relativity, could very strangely be considered valid.

Home field advantage in the NFL exists, and handicappers, as far as I know, generally give it a 3 point advantage; real but small, and pretty close to what richie_and_oprah is saying. NBA has enormous home court swings, which always puzzled me somewhat. I would think that MLB would have the biggest swing, mostly because every park is different, and it DOES have a significant difference, but not so much, I think, as the NBA. Weird...

And yeah, #1s get through A) because they have to play 1 fewer game; B) very small amount due to home field; but mostly C) because they're the best team, which is why they got the 1 seed in the first play. I mean, #1s also bust through the NCAA Men's Div. I Basketball tourney at huge percentages, but there's no home court there

When analyzing MLB you have to incorporate the fact that great teams play 60% ball and terrible teams play 40% ball. This is not the case in the NBA. So any percentage gain of home field advantage should be normalized along these lines.

Neo-ludditial, sir.  The industrial revolution is long gone.

By this reasoning, the sun revolves around the earth, and the earth revolves around the bottom of my feet.  As a result, it turns out that spot between the bottom of my feet and the earth is the actual centre of the universe (relativistically speaking, of course).

Please let the Sun and the Earth away :) I really didn't know what to answer, but the truth is that so much ignorance really scares me sometimes. 

Well, the point of this thread was that, at least for some openings (say Marshall attack), building a database based on computer evaluations for like 10 moves after theory ends will get you a huge advantage, maybe making the opening unplayabale in correspondence chess. The consensus of this thread was that this is OK. The strange thing is that, as confirmed by the staff, a similar database like this:

http://chessok.com/?page_id=352

is considered cheating.

Schachgeek, you say "don't wait for the end of the database, deviate!". Well, if your opponent has a computer-evaluated database, then such a deviation is likely to make you lose the game.

Within the past hour, the site's administrators have deleted a thread that contained a vigorous and instructive debate regarding the use of databases. I suspect the reason for thread deletion was that posters did not conduct themselves in the civil manner that characterized this older thread.

There will always be those that are unfamiliar with the traditions of book and database use in correspondence chess. There will be others that regard their use as somehow "playing with a stacked deck" or "not using your own brain." There will be others who ably defend their use.

In these forums I would hope to see fewer threads concerning whether, and more concerning how. This thread offers a bit of that.

Are you so sure that it was the site's administrators that closed the thread?  The user could have closed his account, or had his account closed, both of which would also result in the thread dissapearing.

I closed it. As i said to Ziryab, there were alot of insults in that thread. Yes its a shame to lose a thread, but there isn't enough manpower hours to delete each post one by one and warn those concerned individually when the level of abuse in a thread is to such a great extent that every other message i get is concerning that thread. Even locking it people were still asking me to go back through it deleting a post, plus all the posts made quoting.  Alot of those insults and attacks shouldn't have been made in the first place. Its a sad day when people hijack threads and attack eachother like that.

That's a real shame.

Yes it is. Perhaps those who attack eachother in the forums may want to consider taking their arguments elsewhere rather than ruining someone elses thread