Author: Roy Eassa
Date: 12:00:05 10/11/02
I have very gradually come around to the idea that what makes a chess computer good against other chess computers may be quite different from what makes it good against strong human chessplayers. Some years ago, PCs were slow enough that the chess author had no choice but to write the program to maximize the search, or else even moderately strong humans could win simply by tactics. But I think now, with PCs over 2 GHz, just 25% of the computer's power is more than sufficient tactically against humans. Against other computers, every ounce of speed must be used to search deeper, as in Fritz or Ruffian. But against humans perhaps the great majority of the power of the CPU needs to be used exclusively to play anti-human chess: avoid locked positions, avoid allowing certain types of attacking formations, "understand" many, many types of positions better, etc. Such a program would likely perform very poorly against the likes of Fritz but could perform much better than Fritz does against top humans. My thought: there should be two totally different classes of chess programs: those that are designed to win against other programs and those that are designed to win against humans. And if you want to create a program that claims to do both, you should have it swap in a completely different set of algorithms -- and not just change a few settings -- depending upon the opponent (human or computer).
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