An Electrical Engineering professor in my area has built a chessboard that works with any pieces, and it records the moves (and times) automatically. The clock is built into the board, and there is no need to press the button as the clock stops automatically after a piece is moved. The “delay” on this clock works in such a way that the time is added after the completion of the move, regardless of how much time has been used, thus it is possible to accumulate time by moving fast enough.
Anyhow, at my quick tournament yesterday, this guy was there, and he played all but one round on his board (one opponent refused). This being a quick tournament, there was a three second delay, which was handled as described above. Anyhow, in one game this player had White, and the Black player eventually ended up losing on time. Black said that he would have resigned, except there were people watching, and he doesn’t resign in front of witnesses. White said that he had noticed that he was down to three seconds at one time, and wasn’t sure if that was 0 + 3 or if he had worked his way down to three. He checked the computer log and saw that he had indeed made a move with no time left on his clock.
Question: What is the correct ruling in this case? I’d like to have something that I can bring back that everyone will agree is fair, and justifyable.
More information would be needed to give decent advice. The most critical is what the clock does when it reaches zero. In any case, since the clock is an add-on clock and not a delay clock, in future events I’d recommend ignoring that clock and using a different timer when the board is used. For non-rated speed play, or play with no delay or add-on, the board and clock sound quite interesting. If the other player did not realize that the clock was using an add-on rather than a delay then you have a stickier situation on you hands. I will only make suggestions based on both players knowing that an add-on was being used and agreeing to play with the non-standard clock.
If the clock gives some indication that time has expired, and if his opponent was informed as to what that indication was, then there are at least two possibilities that could have happened.
One is that it reached zero and then went above zero due to the add-on. In this case a number of rulings might be possible varying from ruling that white lost on time (he ran out of time and then his similar-to-but-not-actually-delay clock “unflagged” him), black lost on time (the game is over and the score is reported), or a draw (both players ended up flagging before any flag was called).
A second is that it went noticeably below one second, but did not actually hit zero, and when he saw it go from zero to three seconds it really went from 0.03 to 3.03 seconds (or something like that). That is one reason that you don’t necessarily call the flag simply when the clock reaches zero, but rather when the clocks flag indicator goes on (if the clock recognizes that the time control was not reached) or when the clock moves at least enough of a second into the next time control so that less than the next time control shows on the clock (when multiple time controls are set, and lapse of the amount of the time in the first time control triggers the move into the second time control rather than having the move counter used to trigger the next time control). Something similar to this happened at the HB when a player barely finished the first time control and the clock showed the 1:00:00 that was the second time control (actually probably 1:00:00.03 or something similar).
Ruling other than a win for white can be considered questionable if the second possibility legitimately exists in this situation.
If the clock does not give any indication that the time has expired, if it may sit at zero for multiple seconds, and if it can do a three second add-on after a move is finally made, then it is almost worthless for indicating that the time has expired. I can’t definitely tell from your question, but it doesn’t sound like the clock has this type of limitation, so this paragraph may be irrelevent to this situation.
It does have a defective clock, so any games with the chessboard would need a second clock. As the computer is on its’ own time as a defective clock, the computer can lose on time as the owner of the computer would have to make the moves independent of the computer.
With the game, the owner of the computer and the player did not know of the defective clock till after the game was over. The score of the game has to stay the same. Example, if you can prove during the last round an analog clock runs two minutes fast every 60 minutes. If someone needed a clock in the first round, then used the clock after asking for it, then won the game on time. It would not be fair to the non-owner to have the game over-turned because of the defective clock was proven in a different round. If the clock is 10 years old, it could have been defective for 10 years. If we cannot go back 10 years to correct a proven error, how can we go back to the last game?
This clock does not have a delay (or non-cumulative addback). Instead, it has an increment (cumulative addback).
It is not proper for a player to set a clock for an increment, in a tournament (such as yours) in which a delay is supposed to be used instead.
Indeed, such a setting can be insidious. The opponent of the clock’s owner may not even become aware that an increment is being used instead of a delay, until late in the game when the players begin to move more quickly than 3 seconds per move. Until that time, delay and increment are equivalent – whenever a player uses more than 3 seconds, the addback is the same either way.
Apparently, the clock had another defect, as well. It failed to stop adding back time after the player’s time had expired. If you check the operation of the Chronos, GameTime, Saitek, DGT, etc, I’m sure you’ll find they ALL stop adding back time, whether in delay mode (Bronstein, Adagio, etc) or increment mode (Fischer, FIDE, bonus, etc), to the clock of a player whose time has expired.
It looks like it should be back to the drawing board for this professor and his special clock / board. I give him kudos for the attempt, however, and I hope he can fix the problems. By the way, how well did the board perform? Were there any problems if a piece was badly j’adoubed, or if pieces were accidentally knocked over, or if an illegal move was attempted? I have heard these problems have existed for other sensory boards.
Hmm, this thread seems to have died. I thought it would generate a lot of discussion.
Since my last post I thought of another possible problem with the professor’s clock: Does the “automatic clock press” occur as soon as the board detects a legal move, or does it wait until the player’s hand releases the piece? I don’t see how any sensory board could reliably detect a player’s hand on the piece, so I assume it’s the former. Unfortunately, this means a player can keep his hand on the piece (thus retaining the right to play a different move with the same piece) even after the opponent’s clock has started.
I would strongly suggest, to the professor, three revisions to his special board / clock:
Use a delay instead of an increment (or have both options).
Fix it so that it no longer adds delay time after a player’s main time has expired.
Require an explicit button press to start the opponent’s clock, rather than doing so automatically when a move is played.
I certainly hope not. I’m pretty sure none of the major clocks (Chronos, Excalibur, DGT, Saitek) behave in this manner. Of course, I can’t say what that professor’s home-brew version does.
Standard digital chess clocks round their displayed time up, not down, to the next second. If the displayed time is 0:00:01, then the actual time remaining is anywhere from a full second down to a tiny fraction of a second. Once it displays 0:00:00, it is really at zero, and the player’s time has truly expired.
To prove this, set a digital clock for 5 minutes, with no delay. Start the clock. You’ll notice that a full second passes before the display switches from 5:00 to 4:59. Thus, when the actual time is, for example, 4:59.03, it is still displaying 5:00.
To look at it another way, the player already received his extra second at the start of the game, so he is not entitled to also claim he has “hidden” time remaining when the display shows all zeroes.
With multiple time controls, the situation is similar. Let’s say the control is 40/120, then game/60, and suppose white’s time runs out as he plays his 40th move. In this case, after white presses his clock, the clock will display 1:00:00. The clock, triggered either by the 40th move or by the expiration of the initial 120 minutes, added an hour. Nevertheless, the player has still lost on time. In this case, a display of 1:00:00 is equivalent to a display of all zeroes. A display of 1:00:01, by contrast, would indicate that there was still time remaining (albeit possibly only a fraction of a second) for the player’s 40th move.
But now we come to the tricky part. Many clocks, when adding the extra hour, revert from minutes-seconds display (m:ss or mm:ss) back to hours-minutes display (h:mm). In the above example, the clock would now show 1:00 (one hour), and you could not tell whether it was really 1:00:00 or 1:00:01 (or, for that matter, 1:00:59). So, in the absence of a special expiration indicator of some sort, you would not know whether the time had expired or not.
The Excalibur, DGT, and Saitek clocks all have just a 3- or 4-digit display, so these clocks all suffer from this problem. As far as I know, only the Chronos can display 5 digits (h:mm:ss). But even with the Chronos, in some modes (such as the move-counting modes), only 3 digits are displayed, so this clock, too, can present a problem.
On my Chronos (an older model), in move-counting mode, if white’s time expires on his 40th move, three hyphens are displayed (instead of the usual one or two) to indicate a time forfeit. But, if black then plays his own 40th and presses the clock, the display reverts to the usual. That’s as it should be, because once it is white’s 41st move, black is no longer entitled to claim a win by time forfeit. (The evidence as to whether the time expired during white’s 40th or 41st has been obfuscated.)
It can be difficult to keep all of this in mind. With seconds rounding upward, but minutes rounding downward (when the display is h:mm), confusion is created.
Bill, I originally thought clocks behaved the way you just stated. However, at the HB there was a player who made his final move of the first time control and hit the Chronos clock. The clock then showed the 1:00:00 of the second time control and the opponent immediately tried to claim the flag. The clock was set with the number of moves triggering the time control change, and with flagging indicated by the three dashes you mentioned. After a discussion among four NTDs the one most senior that also happened to have the most experience with the Chronos made the ruling based on there having been a fractional second left that prevented the three-dashes flag indicator, and ruled that no actual flagging occurred and that the game should continue.
It seems likely to me that this ruling may have been incorrect.
First of all, I’m not at all sure that ALL Chronos models, or all settings, will produce the three-dash flag indicator.
It seems that, in this case, the players chose a mode in which the move count is no longer displayed after the final (sudden death) control begins. (That’s the only way it could show 1:00:00 rather than “40-1:00” or some such.) And, in such a mode, there really wouldn’t have to be a special flag indicator, since all five digits are showing. The display of all zeros (1:00:00) would be a sufficient indicator.
Did anyone check to see whether, on that particular model in that particular mode, there was a three-dash flag indicator? Or whether there was an extra second at the beginning of the game?
Incidentally, on my (older) model, there is still a three-dash flag indicator even in the mode where the move count disappears after move 40. But, as I said, this may not be true on current models, since presumably a full 5-digit display would serve the same purpose.