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Subject: Re: Against Club Players: Are Top Programs Stronger than GM?

Author: Dave Gomboc

Date: 00:43:21 09/05/98

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On September 04, 1998 at 19:50:30, Serge Desmarais wrote:

[snip]

>   But at long tactics or "true" sacrifices, computers aren't too good. In one
>game Tal sacrificed a piece against Smyslov. In the book (was one of a friend,
>so I don't have it here) Tal was giving Smyslov as being lost after the
>sacrifice. I have had Genius look at the positions from about game moves after
>the sacrifice and for several hours. Almost all the way, the program was seeing
>SMYSLOV as winning, until after about 10-12 moves, it SAW that Smyslov was lost!
>Then, I went back, letting the program "think" for about 1 hour on the position
>PRECEEDING the sacrifice. It was preferring the same losing move as Smyslov did!
>Here is another example : Bronstein playing a chess program (would have to
>search to fing which one) in an Aegon's tournament. Bronstein sacrificed a piece
>and blasted the program tatically! I tried the same position on my programs and,
>as I remember, they saw nothing good for Bronstein in that sacrifice, though
>later they admitted he was winning. What is fun in that is that Bronstein just
>took a few seconds (at most 1 minute) to make the winning sacrifice. After the
>game, he just said he KNEW it was winning and did not have to calculate
>anything! In fact, he had so much experience with such positions that his
>brain/instinct was telling him that it was winning! So, some GMs are so good at
>tactics that they don't need to always calculate everything when in familiar

If the GM just "knows" it, it's not tactics to them, just pattern knowledge (or
intuition).  Though I concede that we might still think of it as tactics. :-)

>waters. I myself had a great win against Chessmaster 4000 in the first half of
>the 90's. It claculated a very pretty combination that took me by surprise and
>won one of the pawns on my castle : I hadn't even seen that! After that,
>tripling the pieces on the g-file and, I got the initiative and the advantage
>and managed to win! There was also a nice sacrifice I made against a weak

I posted a couple of games recently where I was able to use an open g-file to
launch an attack on Crafty.  I know that Bob has put in code to avoid 1...Bxa2
2.b3 traps of bishops.  I wonder which chess programs have been tuned to avoid
or express concern about this sort of attack (g-file exposing opponent's king,
but also an open pathway to its own king).

>computer Advanced Chess Challenger Voice), in 1984, that gave me the win.
>Accepting the sacrifice means losing : it takes 12 plies for Fritz 4.01 to not
>accept the sacrifice (though even for me, who is not even an expert, it is
>EVIDENT just at the first sight that it is not good at all to accept the
>sacrifice!
>
>   The only way I see that a GM could have trouble against an amateur player is
>if he underestimate him, not paying too much attention to the game nor taking
>his opponent seriously.
>
>
>Serge Desmarais



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