This thread seems a lot more confused than it ought to be.

First, on the definition. Note the name "hourglass". Apparently it did originate from the use of real hourglasses in the past (in chess, or some other game?). If you stick with that basic imagery, you should have little difficulty understanding how it works. Turn the glass after each play. When the sands of time run out (= your time reduces to zero) you lose. Do not get bound up with differentials, etc. (leave that to the programmers)

Second, regarding the impact on game play. Hourglass is different from all other timing systems that we are used to. Why? It is the only system where the time available to you is determined by how your opponent plays. Think about it. In absolute time, byo yomi, Canadian, Fischer, etc. you always know how much time you will have based on the rules that define the system and the limits agreed to for that game. In some systems, e.g. byo yomi and Canadian, the actual amount of time at your disposal depends on how you play (both have a "use it or lose it" component built in). In Fischer you receive time based only on the number of plays in the game, regardless of how you use it. Absolute of course is WYSIWYG right at the beginning. Hourglass is different. You start with a certain amount of time and then receive an amount of additional time equal to what your opponent uses. The faster your opponent plays, the less time you receive. So with hourglass the clock really becomes a competitive aspect of the interaction between you and your opponent. Short periods bring this additional element into play quickly and that is why people normally play that way AFAIK. It is this new competitive angle that makes hourglass inappropriate for normal tournaments. Why bring in a non-Go competitive element in a serious tournament? By the same token, why not enjoy a separate hourglass competition just for a fun change of pace?

The idea of long games with hourglass seems to assume that you and your opponent will cooperate on the use of the clock in what is otherwise a head to head zero-sum competition. This seems like an odd expectation to me. I think that there is always a prisoners dilemma game waiting to be played out under hourglass timing. If you actually use up nearly all your time, do you really believe that your opponent will kindly return that time to you rather than defect to a time-squeeze strategy?

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

The mere existence of a time system gives that non-Go competitive edge.
Any time system has the competitive angle in the same way. If you play fast in the opening, you get more time in yose, which gives you an edge. That happens with byo-yomi too, both in amateur and professional tournaments.
I dont see why the property as you stated makes it more or less competitive.

I once participated in a tournament in korea where the rounds were programmed to last for an hour or such, but there were no clocks. Sometimes the matches stretched out, and if a lot of moves were left, a referee (pro player) would count and decide the outcome of the game.

The thing that bothered the players the most was not that abrupt finish, that was mandatory for the circumstances, but having spent a lot less time than their opponents which might have been the cause of their game loss.

On the second statement, of course its obvious that both players wont use their max available time each move, thats just a longest-length scenario, which is dreaded in tournaments that have to go through a schedule, or mainly observers, which usually want fast games.


There is something to mention in this conversation and that is what is the goal of them. Why do we use time systems and what do we want to accomplish.

What is very important to me is that games are not lost on time. That is a failure of the time system. Games should be decided by the board and the players, not the clocks.
Different time systems give different properties for players that have different paces. This system is really excellent for matching people that are willing to spend a really long time on a game, but usually cant get a game with a "30 minute main time, 40 seconds /move " kind of setting.

So its good for slow games surely.
And i bet its also good for fast games, although i think Fischer will be the king of blitz in the future.

What happens with 10 second byoyomi is that one player could get a significant edge by playing at the 8th second, while the other randomly plays from the 3rd second to the 8th. IF you note KEGS , people rarely use the max of their 10 second byoyomi.

With hourglass, that different is taken into consideration (also in Fischer) which could level the amount of time the players use.

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Founder of Kaya.gs

After thinking a while about the point of competitiveness, i think Hourglass has less non-Go competition than the others.

If you consider that superior time management means you think more time than your opponent, then all other time systems fail to measure how much one player "outhought" their opponent.

A 10 sec byoyomi, where one player plays at 4sec, and the other at 8sec, means a 2:1 ratio of time spent.
That is practically impossible to happen on hourglass, that ratio cannot hold up.

By that line of reasoning, players quality of time management has less impact on hourglass than on any other time system, making it the lesser non-Go competitive mode.

What do you think ez4u.

_________________
Founder of Kaya.gs

The nature of the competition is different. In the example that you mention, you act upon the belief that spending less of your time on the opening in order to reserve it for the yose will give you an edge. Nothing that you do affects how I use my time as your opponent. I may agree with your assessment and also choose to play quickly in the opening. Or I may disagree and spend relatively more of my time on the opening, planning to achieve an early advantage that you will not be able to offset by a more thoughtful yose. You may be able to demonstrate that your choice was more effective in our game, but you do not have the ability to influence my choice. With hourglass you do. Either side has the basic ability to force a rapid pace of play onto both players. If one side decides to play rapidly, the other can not help but respond in kind, the timing system guarantees it.


See Timing Systems - Redux my opus on SL about the broader history and usage of timing systems.


Hourglass will take away the ability of a player to use 8 seconds when playing against someone who only uses on average 5. In hourglass the faster player always ends up controlling the pace of the game. That is why I think it is an unnecessarily intrusive system, although it can be fun!

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

Try hourglass a few times. I think you will find that the reality is different than you are currently theorizing.

Above it says, "If you consider that superior time management means you think more time than your opponent, then all other time systems fail to measure how much one player "outhought" their opponent."

Hourglass is the only timing system that allows your opponent to prevent you from displaying "superior time management". It is correct to say that the 2:1 ratio can not hold up. However, the problem is that the ratio will always fall to 1:1 at the level of the faster player. So play will proceed at 4 seconds instead of 8 seconds. This is a fundamental "feature" of hourglass.

Give me hourglass for when I am drinking and give me Fischer for when I am serious!

_________________
Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

It's true that there is a major problem with Hourglass: You can play fast random moves to squeeze your opponent in time.
Kaya solved this nicely, but I would like to propose another solution, which I believe is more natural.

On chess clocks, there are 2 basic options you can add to any time system:

-Delay: A Delay of N seconds means that when your opponent clocks, you have N seconds before it affects your time.
-Increment: An increment of N seconds means that when you clock, N seconds are added to your time.

You can use these options with any time system to create new ones. Here's a famous example: Fisher time= Absolute time + increment.

Imagine you play a game with a real hourglass. Your referee arrives, holding the hourglass horizontally, to make sure both players have the same amount of time (sand). The chief referee gives the signal and the game begins. Your referee turns the hourglass as fast as he can, but of course there's a small ___A___. Imagine your referee is very old and slow, then the ___A___ would be bigger. No matter how fast your opponent plays, if you can play within that ___A___, you'll have no problem. Of course a good and fair referee gives the same constant ___A___ to both player.

What if the referee could turn the hourglass at the speed of light, but could also magically add sand on your side to give you an ___B___ only when you're in time trouble?

I think you can naturally find what A and B are. Personally, I think ___A___ offers a more natural solution. What do you think ?

I scanned over the Redux. I also used to believe Fischer was the best timing system for go. I literally hate canadian, i think it has a serious issue with players losing before the time is up (like having to play 20 moves in 20 seconds). And byo-yomi is very inefficient, because time management makes actually the game longer and more clumsy (reading yose before answering an atari is super distracting, just to be able to gain a few seconds).

The problem with Fischer is related to what you mention that 40-60% of the time is spent on a few set of moves ,classicaly L&D situations or turning points.
The problem in Fischer is that you have the lowest minimum time of all time systems. So if you are depending on your bonus time, and one of those hard situations comes up, you will have less time to deal with it than with ANY other time system.

For fast paced games i have no doubt Fischer is best, period. But reality will show us .

Now leaving the "competitivity" of hourglass and into the ratio:

I think its a very good feature of the time system that time management is less of a skill. Now the drawback you mention(that of course bears a lot of weight) is that it will tend to move at the speed of the fastest player.

Being more strict, hourglass is more a 1:1*n ratio with n depending on the Differential time (how i call its "main time").

Someone playing 2 seconds faster than their opponent in average, needs 240 moves to make a 4 minute difference.
(Calculation: A plays, B plays, and B gets 2 more seconds. That means he needs 120 double-plays to make 240 seconds).

So if someone takes average 10 seconds, and his opponent 12 seconds, its likely that a 5-10 minute hourglass would be more than sufficient for the vast majority of games.
What the slower player is subject to is vulnerability to a difficult situation he has to spend a lot of time to think of.

Remember that we added a minimum time to prevent corruption, so you always get at least 10 seconds. If your opponent thinks his average (12 secs) , you will get 22 seconds.

My conclusion so far is that Kaya.gs's Hourglass reduces the effect of the ability of time management, and provides pressure to the slower player mostly in critical situations.

_________________
Founder of Kaya.gs

As we talked about it before, i think this is just a new time system. Define it and call it the "Jean-Sebastian timing". then you pay for a feature and maybe its on the server .

_________________
Founder of Kaya.gs

I think the major problem with this timing is that it will always become a fast game. If you limit the hourglass to 3 minutes to guarantee the game finishes that day, you end up with a situation where no move can take more than 3 minutes. For a serious game, this is very short. As said before, the better blitzer will always end up beating down the slower player.

Yeah, you can add delays or bonus times, but then you're back at some other timing system with a novelty on top of it. Hourglass would be made redundant at that point.

So if I start with, say, 12 sec. and use 10 sec. for my move, the result on my clock is not 2 sec., but 10 sec.? Then after my opponent takes x sec. for his move, the result on my clock will be x+10 sec.?




Say that the players start with 5 min. Showing the slower player's clock first, in seconds, we have (300, 300). Then the slower player takes 12 sec. and the clocks show (288, 312). Then the faster player takes 10 sec., and the clocks show (298,302), a difference of 4 sec. The difference grows at 2 sec./move, so to get a 2 min. difference takes only 60 moves. The average number of moves for the slower player's clock to lose 2 min. is 120.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

The most important feature of a time system for me is to determine in advance how long the game will last (and following from that the pace of the game). It seems that hourglass is not so good at providing that, as the pace of the game depends upon how BOTH players want to play the game. If a want to make sure I have at least the equivalent to a 10 min + 3x30s byo-yomi, I have to set the hourglass to 10 min and then I know I will have at least 10 min + 1x10s. Then me and my opponent could agree upon playing the game in a slower fashion.

So in order to avoid that the game deteriorates into a pure blitz game, I would have to set the hourglass time to at least 10 minutes (or maybe 7 or 8 minutes - but I know that some of my opponents will play really fast). But then I would dislike the 10s I have after that and would rather have it to be 20s.

So I would like to play the hourglass game with 10 min and at least 20s per move. My minimum requirements for game duration would be met and then me and my opponent could still agree upon playing the game at a slower pace.

So ask people about their opinion and you will get a feature request ...

Why not make the minimum time per move a setting in hourglass?

_________________
Stay out of my territory! (W. White, aka Heisenberg)

If i understood correctly, you are just trying to emulate byo-yomi on hourglass.

Definitely hourglass is not a good system to try to guess how long the game will last. But its good to make both players happy on how long it will last, however that is.

Really you have to try it out. There is too much guessing here. I've been playing with it and so far im very satisfied on how it exerts time pressure and how i felt (as the fastest player) regarding the speed of the game.

I dont plan on making the 10 sec rule adjustable. Its really a safety net to prevent game degeneration, not something important under the nature of the system.
If you want to be able to have a minimum time for any move at any part of the game, Byo-yomi is more suited for that.

_________________
Founder of Kaya.gs

I think I understand what you are saying about Fischer having the lowest minimum time. It is because people expect byo yomi or canadian (or Bronstein but we don't have that on our servers either ) to take less time due to poor usage. But if you plan a tournament that way you will run into those better at time management who use virtually every second of their allowance and overrun the planned round times.


Let's look at some examples. I could still find the games that I used to write Redux so all the timings were already in my old spreadsheets. This allowed me to quickly make some simulated hourglass timings.

All the following graphs show seconds on clocks on the vertical axis and game move numbers on the horizontal axis. In all cases I simply used the actual game timings that I had from the old files to simulate the play under hourglass timing. Whenever time was not available on the clock, the play was truncated to preserve 1 second remaining time. No attempts at active time management are assumed (e.g. use of additional time on the move following a truncation). In all the simulation graphs we see:
- B Clock/W Clock, representing an hourglass clock with no delay, and
- B Clck De/W Clck De, representing an hourglass clock with a 10-second delay.

Let's start with an easy one - a Canadian 25 stones in 3 minutes example:

Both players played so quickly that I had to use 120 seconds for the hourglass settings before the clocks even approached their limits. Neither player dominated this game. Note how the first 40 or so moves were all made in less than 10 seconds so no time moved on the B Clck De/W Clck De lines.

Next another good showing for hourglass:

In this 60-minute absolute game a ten-minute hourglass (300 seconds on each clock to begin) would have performed well. The players exchanged the position of holding the majority of time with Black ahead on the clock in the early going, White pulling clear around move 110, and then Black coming back for the end of the game. White hit a constraint on a single play around 180. In the game White thought for a little over 7 minutes, but this would have been truncated after about 3 minutes and 20 seconds in our simulation.

Something a little more problematic:

This is a second 60-minute absolute game with a 10-minute hourglass simulated. Why do I say it is problematic? Here are the actual clocks from the game file.

In the actual game the players used their time in very similar ways, as shown here. In total there was a cumulative difference of only 16 seconds between them at the end of the game. Yet in the hourglass simulation, White is constrained on several moves and loses 104 seconds versus the actual game. Personally, I am not so happy with this result considering how tight the pattern was on the actual game clocks.

Hmmm...

This is where it gets nasty. This is a third 60-minute absolute game. Obviously Black is dominated by White and ends up severly constrained in this game. Black losses 21.5 minutes in the simulation and over 19 even with the delay. So what, isn't that what is supposed to happen? Well, yes it is. However,...

Here are the actual game clocks. Note that White used much less than the agreed time. This is the situation that I believe is always on the table as the negative case with hourglass. That the actual play is different than our expectation.

One might say that we can fix this by increasing the time in the hourglass. That is correct, but probably not as easily as people would expect. In this case:

Even a 30-minute hourglass (15 minutes on each clock to start) does not really protect against a surprise.

_________________
Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

Im not going to say i understand the data and graphs perfectly. What i understand from this is that comparing hourglass to absolute time, in absolute time you are able to spend a long time on a place your opponent isnt thinking a lot on.

In hourglass that is not possible, as you have a low maximum(lowest of all time systems). Im not surprised by this really.

Its really hard to measure the experience of the time setting. As an experience, absolute time is very bad. To some extent, its popular use what will determine if a time system is good or not.

As i said in my previous conclusion, hourglass makes the slower player vulnerable to situations that require a lot of time only for him(wher eits harder to play for him than his opponent, for example), in comparison to canadian/byo-yomi, but better than fischer or fast byo-yomi with no periods left.

EDIT: while digesting my delicious pasta i re-read the graphs. I find the "nasty" case to be a perfect case of what hourglass tries to avoid as a time system.
White probably was left unsatisfied at the time system, and would have liked to either use a lot less absolute time or use another one. And that could have happened with a large main time in any other time system, except Hourglass.

In the end i think that there is no one Time System to rule them all. They fit into different situations (except Canadian. I hate canadian.), which could be round organization (nothing better than absolute for a one-day tournament), well thought games (large byo-yomi) or a quick blitz( Fischer).

Hourglass is now in the mix and i think it satisfies this particular problem i mention in the EDIT.

Bronstein is half-done, but has very low priority. It will probably happen before canadian .

_________________
Founder of Kaya.gs

Isn't Fischer a good system for slow serious games, given large initial time and a fairly small increment?

You are right that I should try it out on your server, before complaining ...

But to make it clearer: No, I am not trying to emulate byo-yomi. I like the idea of both players agreeing on the speed of the game via hourglass and playing a happy game . However, as mentioned by others, the faster player is kind of 'in control' and can force a high speed on his opponent. In order to put a certain 'lower boundary' to this, I think it would be nice to be able to increase the 10 s.

This would not be necessary if I play a friend of mine. But if I play random, unknown opponents, it will occur that some of them will sort of 'abuse' the system with the sole purpose of turning the game into blitz. Without the possibility of increasing the 10 s, hourglass will basically only be played by people who are not afraid of having to play the endgame (or even middlegame) with 10 s, whereas other people (like me) would also like to play hourglass.

_________________
Stay out of my territory! (W. White, aka Heisenberg)

Ok i will make one last clarification on how the system works. I will advise those subsequent questions on how it works, to try it out, or wait to be able to try it out on kaya.

Once you have reached the last 10 seconds for your play, that means that you can think 9.99 seconds, and still in your next turn you will have at least 10 seconds.

Your opopnent can try to pressure you into only having 10 seconds, but that means he has to think 0 seconds. Even if he takes 2 seconds to play, on your next turn you have 12 seconds.
So exherting a 12 second time pressure requires you to play at 2 seconds. That is a very bad strategy. 600% time use difference is to the favour of the one with less time.

If your opponent takes 8 seconds, you will get 18 in your next turn, which is still pretty lax and over 2:1 your opponents time.

In the end, with our modification, they person that suffers time pressure will get more time absolutely by the end of the game (because of this bonus). OF course, he still has to play fast, and he is vulnerable to complex situations, so he is sped-up.

In hourglass, time-pressuring your opponent is a burden on the one with more time, so its less likely to be an effective strategy. Precisely because to make the opponent think less, you have to think less also.

Hope this clears your doubts.

_________________
Founder of Kaya.gs

Can we try it out without paying?

Your last post confuses me, Gabriel ...

While I would rather have you work on the server instead of having to reply to stupid posts here, I cannot resist to ask once more:

Say my clock is run down to almost zero and I make my move just in time. My opponent now has the basic time on his clock (for example 10 min). My opponent makes his move within 2 seconds. I assumed my clock now is set to 10 s.

After your last reply it seems my clock is set to 12 s. This would mean the algorithm checks my clock at the beginning of my move and if it is below 10 s, then 10 s are added. This would be very strange, because there would be a very different situation for 9 s and 11 s - so that does not make sense ...

_________________
Stay out of my territory! (W. White, aka Heisenberg)

No, I think what it means is as soon is you move, if it is below ten, it is set back too ten.