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Subject: Re: Zappa web update & a few other things

Author: Peter Berger

Date: 06:23:15 08/28/05

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Thanks for your very nice tournament report. It's nice to hear that you go
commercial although it will be hard to get used to this gay teddy ;) .

Joking aside.

---

Concerning "sceptical programs" and my alleged quote ( that I don't remember
just like that ;) ) . I don't know how useful that term is ( and I am sceptical
about it :) ) , but there is something serious about it. The major contender in
this group is certainly Fruit right now. Professionals have become very
speculative about material in recent years, and I think they might have overdone
it at times. Zappa is not very sceptical either.

I am currently playing a big series of games between Fruit and Junior for fun
who play at nearly the exact same level, but reach their aims in very different
ways. Speculative vs sceptical is a term that fits quite well IMHO. Very
fascinating games btw, I'll probably post some later.
--

The "Strategy of Attack" ( trademark Futé and  Jean-Louis Boussin) . Yes, this
one was a bit funny, but maybe there should be at least a little explanation on
what it is about. I'll try.

From what I understood Futé does some complicated static evaluation at the root
position (pre-processing) to guide the search and trigger some search extensions
(his strategies). So far there were only two implemented in the program, the
"strategy of attack" and the "strategy of defense" ( that was not really working
well yet according to the author).

Usually Futé's search lacked some depth so that it was outsearched quite often
in games. Now when the "Strategy of Attack" kicked in ( as far as I understood
triggered by the number of pieces directed against the opponent's king mainly) ,
Futé managed to search some lines a lot deeper. This is what happened in the
Zappa game for all I know.
The vagueness is not due to lack of explanations by Futé's author but more by my
ignorance. *No one* could complain about Jean-Louis Boussin not talking and
explaining enough ;) ) .

In practice that led to the Futé's author looking at his screen and always
hoping that at some point the "strategy of attack" would kick in . E.g. it
happened once in the game Crafty-Futé - unfortunately in a position where there
was already a mate in 3 against Futé .

Peter



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