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Subject: Re: The correlation between Standard and Chess960 is not parallel

Author: Sune Fischer

Date: 23:42:21 06/27/05

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On June 28, 2005 at 02:04:27, Reinhard Scharnagl wrote:

>On June 27, 2005 at 21:58:51, Jorge Pichard wrote:
>
>>Just because a program is strong at standard chess doesn't mean that it will be
>>strong at Chess960. For instance there is a noticeable difference between
>>standard Pharaon 3.3 and Standard Freenze, whereas according to my test,
>>FRC-Freenze is almost equal in strength to Chess960 Pharaon 3.3.

I find that hard to believe, usually when things look too good to be true it's
because you just haven't played enough games yet... ;)

>This is not at all surprising to me. It reflects the unability of most engines
>to UNDERSTAND positional implications during opening. This will be covered in
>traditional chess by a) opening libraries, b) optimized weights in piece type
>specific coordinate related bonus/malus tables.
>
>Smirf is avoiding the use of such tables to force the programmer (in that case:
>me) to improve the program to a better positional understanding by AVOIDING
>such intelligence murdering piece-coordinate 'optimized' tables, and of course
>by switching from huge looking-up tables corrupted chess to Chess960's freedom.

You tell 'em Reinhard! :)

Design philosophy or not, the question is what is it worth in real play Elo.
I think unfortunately not much.

Of course if the engine is used to having a good book and doesn't have any
development terms on its own, then one could possibly be in for a grim awakening
in FRC.

>I am sorry about the fact, that Smirf's growing abilities are tested nearly by
>nobody. Some feed back could be very helpful.

Does Smirf support a protocol like UCI or WBI/WBII?

-S.
>Reinhard.



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