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AI: The x'000 year-old game of competitive backgammon may well have to change...
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: AI: The x'000 year-old game of competitive backgammon may well have to change... (Pendragon)
Date: Sunday, 24 March 2024, at 1:28 p.m.
Pendragon wrote: Remove the incentive.
Here's a passage from Hans Ree's book, The Human Comedy of Chess, as quoted in Christian Hesse's book, The Joys of Chess, page 200. It's about Milan Matulovic's participation in the 1995 Senior World Championship. Pay attention to the final two sentences below.
One of the participants was Matulovic. In his prime, he was the symbol of all that was bad in chess. He would take back moves after making them, he was buying and selling games, and in general used all the dirty tricks in the book. Everybody knew his nickname, J'adoubovic. A Dutch player named Oud had to play against Matulovic in the ninth round of the veterans tournament. Matulovic was still a good player, but had clearly become less resolute. After the 24th move, he exceeded the time limit. Oud went to report this to the tournament arbiter. Returning to his board, Oud noticed that Matulovic had set his clock back a little, so it now looked as if he had never run out of time. So Oud went to find a witness. Then he came back again to his board, only to find that this time Matulovic had advanced his opponent's clock by quite a bit, so he could argue that the clock was malfunctioning. Alas, yet another witness was produced, and Matlovic was given a zero for the game! In his heyday, Matulovic could sell you a place in the World Championship Candidates' Matches. Now he was sixty. There was no money at stake in the game against Oud, prize money in the veterans tournament is very limited, and anyhow Matulovic was too low in the rankings to win. But he was still up to his old tricks, now performing them for free, as art for art's sake. I must admit, I was moved by it.
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