Author: Peter Berger
Date: 08:25:30 10/22/02
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On October 21, 2002 at 21:39:17, Bob Durrett wrote: >P.S. I think 40 in 2 and 30 per half thereafter is REAL chess. 40 in 60 or 90 >is just speed chess. Good enough for the media but not for SERIOUS chess. Yes, I agree with you when we talk about chess between humans. But why should the same be true for computers? If you give your favourite chessprogram only 60 minutes for 40 moves - is it your impression that its chess becomes unserious? Fernando posted that he likes to play games against his chessprograms with 40 moves in 90 minutes. I think he belongs to a very tiny minority of users here - one of the reasons probably is that he is a very strong player, 2200+ . Do many people play chess against their chessengines with unweakened settings? I doubt it, although some probably like to get a good spanking occasionally. But I suspect nearly everybody will prefer faster time controls for their training games against chessprograms. Other people use their chessprogram as an analysis tool, either with fast time control for tactical blunderchecks or with very long time controls for overnight analysis. For all these groups results by programs in comp-comp games at 40/120 are rather meaningless, maybe with the exception of the analysis guys ( this is debatable). Still people feel 40/120 is the most serious time control for chessengines. How come? When it is about engine matches I can't explain without psychological explanations. People probably like to identify with their engines and maybe imagine themselves sitting at the engine's side playing all these brilliant (or sometimes dumb) moves themselves. When it is about watching computers playing each other to see interesting games or learn something (?!) there is no reason to use 40/120 . Why not 60 (10) Fischer time control instead? Many advantages - it's still quite slow, so you can think about what happens, and it has the big advantage that you can calculate how long a game will last. Who has time to watch engines playing each other for five hours? And if you dont watch - what is the use of letting them play each other in the first place? And think about hardware advances. In two years computers will probably be three or four times faster again. Will the 40/120 games of today lose their merit then. How about the 40/120 games of five years ago? You could them at 40/20 easily now :) This leaves one final issue - 40/120 games are considered more important because they last that damn long that it takes forever to get a significant amount of games, and someone who really takes all that time to let engines play each other is certainly dedicated, which earns our respect. But this again doesn't mean that the games themselves are any more meaningful. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that results of computer matches at 40/120 are only interesting for the programmers themselves, a very tiny group of users and for marketing reasons - the SSDF list holds a high prestige and they have earned it well. I think the results of the SSDF list might be even more useful for a bigger group of users if they changed their timecontrol to say 90 10 Fischer time control though (to not shock people too much ;) ). Peter
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