Progess (often) is ugly, a summary try

[hyatt]

CW speaks perfect english and his statemens have a logic and he is often true with his
thesis. so i don't see how you can relate this with each other.

what is true is, that i would not call chris w. a friend of the ICCA/ICGA.
if you want to read an example how he argues and how he talks you can read the following texts as example:

http://www.thorstenczub.de/complcss2.html
http://www.thorstenczub.de/ihatematerialists.html

now tell me those texts are not logical or weak or whatever ...
IMO chris is very good in writing texts.

Chris is very good when he _wants_ to be. You can confirm that he and I have had +many+ exchanges that were both useful and informative for both of us. But there are other exchanges that were anything but. Including his propensity to use aliases, and to disguise his writing style to make it appear to be a second person in agreement with him.

[thorstenczub]

hi bob. chris says he is not posting in talkchess.
i do believe him. the guy posting there speaks IMO a very different english then chris is speaking.

[ernest]

http://www.thorstenczub.de/complcss2.html
http://www.thorstenczub.de/ihatematerialists.html

now tell me those texts are not logical or weak or whatever ...
IMO chris is very good in writing texts.

Hi Thorsten,

I (re)read those texts with pleasure!

But now they are 15 years old, and I wonder if his distinction between "classical" (bean-counter) programs and "intelligent/dynamic/looking-glass" programs still holds with today's top programs.
Would he say that Fruit is still "classical" and the recent Rybkas are "new paradigm"?
Which would explain why he seems to support Rybka in the current battle...

[hyatt]

Rybka is certainly not "new paradigm". Nobody today is "new paradigm" as the term was being used back then... I can't answer your other question...

[BB+]

I don't know if it mattered any (as I say, I only intervened on behalf of CW afterward, so I don't know all the details), but just to be complete I will mention another aspect regarding the identity verification of CW with the ICGA Panel. It seems as though a WikiSpaces account with the name "chriswhittington" joined the IPPOLIT wiki in Sep 2009 [before publicity ensued] -- after the publicity came, someone (Conkie?) was giving a history of what they knew about it, and put quotation marks around "Chris Whittington" when noting this, suggesting that the name might be false [my recollection was that the phrasing was rather ambiguous as to whether Conkie himself might have made that account].

The 150K of email correspondence that CW sent me back in March additionally notes the "vote" for acceptance of the Secretariat/Levy was 4-0 [assuming identity verification] before his "outburst" [CW suggests they deliberately provoked him], and 0-4 afterward (though as Bob has pointed out, Levy of course had the final say in any case). Harvey had sent me an email back then indicating how onerous it was to verify certain persons (e.g., Wylie Garvin was an "unknown" to the ICGA, who worked for a games company in Montreal yet had a UK email, IIRC), and said there was a nontrivial backlog in the identity verification part of application processing (which seems to have been disjoint from the "vote" on whether a person was suitable). After the fact, there was validation of CW's email by someone else, but by then it was too late.

It seems to me that there just happened to be problems at both ends [MarkL had no previous contact with CW and was following the same protocol as with anyone else], with exactly the wrong person, and that CW seems not to have expected the "identity verification" to be so strict.

[BB+]

bloviating corporate shills like Albert Silver

I'll leave such an assessment to others, but here is an excerpt from him about such matters (Jan 26 2011):

I think the slant you perceive is from a prejudice you have with CB. I say this sincerely. I'll give you an example, and of course these are my 2 cents. WIth the ongoing Rybka-Ippo wars, I was repeatedly accused of being a proxy for Vas, because I was being "paid" by Vas with betas of his program. I won't comment on how stupid that sounds. This was then changed to being a voice of Chessbase after I began writing for the News page, where supposedly I was now being asked/paid to plug Rybka, not for Vas, but for CB's benefit. Which is to not realize how small this microscosm is. After this any comment I made on Rybka was supposedly for CB or Vas. You go figure. It could not possibly be my actual point of view. No sirree. [...]

[wgarvin]

Harvey had sent me an email back then indicating how onerous it was to verify certain persons (e.g., Wylie Garvin was an "unknown" to the ICGA, who worked for a games company in Montreal yet had a UK email, IIRC), and said there was a nontrivial backlog in the identity verification part of application processing (which seems to have been disjoint from the "vote" on whether a person was suitable).

In my case, I signed up for wikispaces with my work address, which is from the ubisoft.com domain. I am in Montreal, Canada which is one of our largest development studios, but Ubisoft is headquartered in France. I exchanged a couple of e-mails with Harvey (iirc) before I was granted access. It did not seem onerous at all, but I got the impression that (1) it was important to verify that all members were using their real names, and (2) that in addition to technical expertise, the panel discussions needed to be civil and productive, and that persons not willing to conduct themselves accordingly would not be wanted on panel. Having seen some of the nonsense that gets posted in the talkchess General forums sometimes, its hard to disagree with that.

[BB+]

I re-read the CW correspondence again after posting a few days ago, and there well could have been some "red-flag" with the email accounts in the identity verification process.

The first sortie (other than Bob's mis-click) is that MarkL seems to have sent an identity verification email to CW's "ICGA account" [seems to mean the email address that the ICGA has on record -- in the case of CW, it might be obsolete] soon after CW applied. It seems that he got no response, so after a few days he sent an email to CW's Yahoo account, asking him to check his "ICGA account message" -- but CW responded to MarkL from his Yahoo account [It could be that CW thought his Yahoo account was his "ICGA account" (possibly with mail-forwarding involved?), but I can't parse the mis-understanding at this point].

In any event, MarkL then asked for an alternative way of verifying his identity (e.g., a trusted person who knows CW uses this Yahoo email address -- which indeed transpired within a few hours), but CW had been provoked enough, etc.

[Chris Whittington]

I re-read the CW correspondence again after posting a few days ago, and there well could have been some "red-flag" with the email accounts in the identity verification process.

The first sortie (other than Bob's mis-click) is that MarkL seems to have sent an identity verification email to CW's "ICGA account" [seems to mean the email address that the ICGA has on record -- in the case of CW, it might be obsolete] soon after CW applied. It seems that he got no response, so after a few days he sent an email to CW's Yahoo account, asking him to check his "ICGA account message" -- but CW responded to MarkL from his Yahoo account [It could be that CW thought his Yahoo account was his "ICGA account" (possibly with mail-forwarding involved?), but I can't parse the mis-understanding at this point].

In any event, MarkL then asked for an alternative way of verifying his identity (e.g., a trusted person who knows CW uses this Yahoo email address -- which indeed transpired within a few hours), but CW had been provoked enough, etc.

You keep on looking for technical reasons but the reality is that Bob Hyatt did not want a dissenter on the wiki, he said as much in Rybka forum actually. Since I was the person who blew up their Kangaroo Court One that meant main dissenter = ChrisW. Bob needed a unanimous guilty verdict to justify his defamations of Vas.

As far as I can remember my last contact with icca (now igca) would have been in 1997, from not long after that I stopped paying the subcription and stopped being a member. My email at that time would have been almost certainly my company email, ie an oxfordsoftworks.com email. As icga should be perfectly well aware, I sold Oxford Softworks in 2000 and was no longer connected to the company, in 2003 the new company owners bankrupted the company and it no longer exists. Common sense would indicate that trying to contact on an email no longer in use for between 12 and 15 years is a bit daft.

Verification would have been easy via Ed Schroeder who was in the loop during this application or by Bob Hyatt with whom I had communicated via email relatively recently. Quite why Bob didn't just say "it's Chris, no need for all this" is a question you should perhaps ask yourself.

[Chris Whittington]

CW speaks perfect english and his statemens have a logic and he is often true with his
thesis. so i don't see how you can relate this with each other.

what is true is, that i would not call chris w. a friend of the ICCA/ICGA.
if you want to read an example how he argues and how he talks you can read the following texts as example:

http://www.thorstenczub.de/complcss2.html
http://www.thorstenczub.de/ihatematerialists.html

now tell me those texts are not logical or weak or whatever ...
IMO chris is very good in writing texts.

Chris is very good when he _wants_ to be. You can confirm that he and I have had +many+ exchanges that were both useful and informative for both of us. But there are other exchanges that were anything but. Including his propensity to use aliases, and to disguise his writing style to make it appear to be a second person in agreement with him.

Yet more defamatory lies from you. Btw Mark Watkins at least had the decency to apologise for repeating your windmill tilting lie on talkchess that I was some crazy poster over there last week. I have not, do not and have no intention of going anywhere near talkchess and have not been there for about three years now.

I do not have a "propensity to us aliases" nor do I ever, nor have I ever used a fake account to "agree with myself". I'm quite good enough as myself, by myself in my usual minority of one.

I was banned at talkchess for life by the owner of talkchess, Schwartz, basically for arguing that the forum should not have been and should not be running on a commercial shop site. talkchess was, unfortunately, at that time the key comp chess site, and, to read it, I would be forced to make up some silly name to register. After Schwartz left (about four or five years ago?) it seemed policy changed and I verified that I was not going to get banned again for being me and logged in using my own name - other than not being there at all for about three years, that is the way it has stayed.

You know all this perfectly well because you were/are part of the banning process.