Automated Trading Championship 2008: Registration Is Over!

Did my EA make it? David McArthur. EA: MRSCOTTIA

Hello,

I had the following email (copied below) sent to me about verification of my submitted EA to the competition. Now does this mean my EA is accepted or not as it doesn't make it clear. It just points out some minor errors.

According to the Championships rules EAs can be rejected for either of the following conditions;

• never contain any critical bugs (like looping or hanging up, etc.) or explicitly harmful actions in the code
• be economical with the use of resources on the processor and PC memory

Now certainly my EA did not break either of these rules. The EA, performance wise, was very fast and had no excessive use of resources nor were any crtical bugs found. I will ve very annoyed after the amount of time I have spent developing it that it is excluded because of minor issues that the EA handles and contines to operate without any serious flaws.

Can you please tell me if my EA is accepted as i is not clear at the moment.

Thanks.

Copy of the email>>>>>>>>>

The verification of your Expert Advisor is complete. Expert Advisor checking report:

No, your EA did not pass precontest check.

Thanks for the reply Rosh,

But under what clauses in the rules does it not conform?

See Jury Session Record of the 10th of October 2007

Rosh,

How can my EA possibly be disqaulified under that clause? The link you sent me to refers to last years competition where EAs were rejected because they generated over 100,000 log errors. Very clearly these were critical problems.

However, mine had 5 log entries over an 8 month period. This is hardly excessive use of resources nor a critical bug under any reasonable interpretation as the EA coped with the problem and took under 31 second to complete the test for an 8 month period.

Is there any appeal process as this is blantantly not excessive?

I think anyone reading this in an impartial manner would agree.

What the acceptable number of error messages? 5? 10? Let 5 messages are acceptable, then 6 (5+1) messages are not ? If we consider N messages are acceptable why N+1 messages should lead to disqualification?

There is only 1 decision - no one error message.

Is my EA accepted? EA name: doytfxbot

I have disabled backtesting in the EA. Will this affect the admission of my EA for the contest?

The rules say that EA should open at least 8 sensible trading orders during backtesting. If you disabled it, how do you adhere to that rule?

Thank you for the reply Rosh,

The rules are clear - "never contain any critical bugs (like looping or hanging up, etc.) ". It does not say "never have any error meesages", the two are distinctly very different.

The first is open to subjective interpretation hence why you have a Jury to make decisions on such matters during the competition. Most deveopers would accept and know what a "critical" bug was and the difference with few error meesages that are minor in nature and could not be categorised as major nor critical.

If my EA was running in the competition it would never have been disqualified under a Jury decision as quiet obviously the issue cannot be cateregorize as critical. In fact, the EA would never have been submitted to a Jury decision in the first place as it wouldn't have been identified as been a problem EA with performance issues.

Hovever, the criteria you have used to exclude my EA before the competition starts is manifestly different to that which it would be subjected to during the running of the competition. I have gone to a lot of time and effort in developing this EA and I am only asking for the rules to be applied consistently and in the manner they are written down.

The competition rules are there to stop blatant cheating and any obviuosly seriously flawed EAs with critical bugs in. They shouldnt be there to stop genuine hard working developers from submitting there efforts.

I ask again is there an appeal process? Surely, any reasonable minded person can see the difference I am highlighting here and a Jury would take these factors into consideration.

I am not asking to change my EA just for it to run as it is now. If it were allowed to be entered then there is no way a Jury could judge it had broken any rules because it hasn't and thus it would not be disqualified which is at odds with the pre-competition rules. The difference is a Jury would use common sense and see the argument above as valid whereas in pre-competition rules any automatically generated error meesage created as part of pre-checking is deemed critical which is obvuiously nonsense.

Please, please, please can the rules be applied properly (according to how they are written) to my entry and it be allowed. If in competition it is deemed to be unacceptable by a Jury then I would accept the decision but I am not even being given a fair opportunity to be heard?