Saturday, March 07, 2009

FIDE Assembly Minutes

If you happen to be interested in such things, the minutes to FIDE's General Assembly, held during the Dresden Olympiad, have now been published. Annex number 50, the Swiss Pairings Committee Report, has some info that might be of interest to arbiters:

The chairman, Mr.Markkula and Mr.Stubenvoll reported that they have tested the program [Tournament Service 6.0], which is now producing fairly good pairings due to the Dutch Swiss rules. Therefore the committee proposes the endorsement of the program Tournament service for the pairings of Dutch Swiss rules. The committee unanimously stated that the endorsement of a program is only concerning the pairings due to the specified rules. The committee will neither judge other special functional features of a program or ist applicalbility [sic] at all nor give recommendations for chosing a special program.

Then, there's this bit: "Mr. Tsorbatsoglou regretted that the Swiss System rules are grown up [sic] so complicated that neither players nor most of the arbiters understand them. The chairman replied that the complexity is the price for increased fairness compared to older rules. Nevertheless the committee will wellcome [sic] any proposals for new simple Swiss System rules."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

In light of the fractured English used in the Minutes, I wonder what "fairly good pairings" means.

DJ

Garvin said...

I was going to make a similar post to Denis. Most pairing programs that attempt to use dutch pairing rules make 'fairly good pairings'. It is the exceptions to these fairly good pairings that causes all the problems.

Unknown said...

As the author of the now-endorsed program "TournamentService" (TS), I can assure you, in this case "fairly good" means TS has undergone *very* rigorous testing by the swiss pairing comittee. During a process taking two years, TS has proved no errors in the released version. I think it is fair to say, testing shows TS produces better pairings than the established competitors, and is taking the latest updated rules into account.