WHY THE BIG DROP???

I noticed the number of groups formed for the monthly cup (speaking of chess only) has dropped dramatically over the past few months...

at one time there were as many as 50 to 60 groups forming each month for the monthly cup, lately it's been less than 30 and even 20...in OTHER WORDS, so many fewer people are playing at littlegolem...

has anyone an explanation???

where are players headed???

are players losing interest in internet games???

well the only reason that i can think of that may have affected the sudden drop in player #s is that school/work started and summer holidays are over :D

I have observed a similar effect with WYPS, around Feb/Mar. What happens is (my theory!): There are 4-5 players that sign on for every MC, immediately. That means that whenever they were online, a group fills up, so every day one or two groups start.

When one or two players drops out of that circle (*not* signing on for every MC), the group sits with 3/4 participants for a much longer time, until some 'passer-by' takes the last slot.

In WYPS, I stopped signing on for every single one at that time. i might have had that effect - I did check in at least 6 times a day, and all the time, the group ahd four people and was waiting. When I signed up and started the MC, 6 hours later the same four were waiting again for the next group to complete.

What I'm saying is that once the number of intense players drops below a certain critical threshold, a *lot* less MCs will happen.

There are surely other effects overlaying it in addition.

I have used to play in most of chess MCs, but I don'tlike the fact that many people who sign up almost all the time use engines in their games, so I stopped. btw, is engine use allowed or not?

Well, numbers really started to drop when mahmoud stopped signing up...

Mahmoud stopped! Well what's the point any more. I'll just unregister from life.

@somar96: of course, engines are not allowed. Any computer help is considered cheating.

As you find in many older threads, it is quite easy to slip down that road. In the beginning, you use the computer to analyse games played already, then you 'just want to make sure you didn't miss anything stupid', then you consider the moves the computer considers, and finally you play the program's moves... It's like smoking, 'I can always stop when I want'...

In chess with the best programs at 3300 Elo where the best human ratings in history are around 2800, I guess you don't even understand the computer move (until it is too late, of course). I am a weak chess player so there is nothing I could do except believing in the computer. That's why I don't play chess turn based. In go, you can see the best programs play so many provably horrible moves, that following their moves is a sure way to lose. But you can use use it as a sparring. If you can play and win you current position, you understand it better. The program may disprove some ideas you thought were better than they are, or suggest moves you may have overlooked. I don't see this as cheating, working on your moves is what makes turn based servers have sense. To play the best move you can think with just a static evaluation of the board, you play real time.

well there is no anti-cheating defence here it seems, so it's full of cheaters

@aganju: of course, engines are not allowed. Any computer help is considered cheating.

This seems indeed to be the consensus here, but looking at things in a wider perspective; *all* organisations do not ban 'engines'! For example the most official (well, the only one recognised by FIDE at least) corr.chess organisation, ie. ICCF, does NOT ban engines. The main reason is that there we compete for the 'official' world championship title (the one recognised by FIDE) and *how on earth* could you *enforce* such a ban?? I mean, when even playing on a 'for-fun' site like Little Golem can make people go to ridiculous lengths to artificially inflate their ratings - what do you expect the title 'World Champion' could make people do?

So we have taken a conscious decision to allow engines, and fortunately in 'offline chess' computers are capable of much less than 3300 (for us humans, time is not such a limiting factor offline as over-the-board!) so the world champions still have to possess quite remarkable 'tacit knowledge' of chess. You simply cannot make it even to the world championship final round by merely acting as 'mailman' for your chess engine!

Having said that, other (simpler?) games are of course much worse off than chess. LinesOfAction was almost destroyed (on LittleGolem at least) until the black hole variant was introduced in the championships.

I mostly play on chess.com, it's the biggest online community and they ban engines.

How?

I mean how do they find out that someone uses an engine?

They have a lot of methods, and they don't reveal them, but the easiest and most well-known one is checking games with an engine and seeing how many moves match with the engines choice. Games of World Champions, both OTB and Correspondence (from pre-computer era) have been analysed, and if the matchup is much higher than in the WC games it means a player a cheater.

It's a good job nobody ever thought of making the 2nd-best move the engine provides.

No, it counts top 1, 2, 3, 4