Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 20:28:09 11/02/97
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On November 02, 1997 at 20:25:39, Joe Beck wrote: >What was with Crafty at this event? I really think it is a good >program, and with running on a DEC Alpha, I really thought it might >score a good result. Does anyone know what happend? Bob? > >Thanks, >Joe I don't have a clue yet. Several possibilities come to mind: 1. the top 3/4 of the field was *very* strong, with (probably) not a whole lot of difference in strength. This makes the thing a crap shoot anyway, since who would be favored in a group of 24+ fairly close players? 2. I've done lots of tuning in long games, but almost *all* of it is against humans. Humans that are *very* good at playing anti-computer chess. My attempts to thwart this style could easily backfire and make it play oddly. 3. the extra depth on the alpha could also work against this, letting it see even deeper, and get concerned about things that would likely not be played by the opponent (IE the only program that I know of that plays even *remotely* like some of the IM/GM players I see on ICC is CSTal... where it goes for complex rather than normal positions.) Crafty might well have been defending against moves that would never have been played. 4. It is certainly possible that Crafty is simply not playing well when comparing it to other programs at the WMCCC. I find this hard to believe, but Crafty's "environment" (various chess servers) expose it to a type of chessplayer that most of the other programs there haven't seen, and haven't been tuned for. And that could cause lots of trouble for Crafty. I will know more after I see the log files, but the most worrisome thing I saw was how poorly it did in the blitz event, which it should be *very* strong at, based on results against IM/GM players. I may have introduced a serious bug for all I know, although I have seen no evidence of one in a couple of weeks of steady playing on ICC. One thing that is a potential problem is that in Jakarta we played on the same hardware we test on all the time. In Paris we were about 2.5 times faster. Using a different compiler. It is certainly possible that we had unknown problems caused by this new compiler. Jason ran lots of tests on the alpha and compared node counts to the P6, so we "thought" we had covered this eventuality. Maybe we overlooked something. I believe it is better than it showed. But I also believe that the programs at the top are also *very* strong. There's always next year... :)
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