Author: Jon Dart
Date: 19:12:51 02/26/06
A few notes from Arasan's games in CCT8: Arasan is playing on faster hardware this year and also has gotten a significant speed boost (20% or so) from being built with Visual C++ and Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO). I tried the Intel compiler with PGO, but did not get as good results. It has also had quite a bit of eval tuning in the last year and now is using history pruning, besides all the other pruning tweaks version 8.4 has. The first game was against "Crash Test Dummy", ctd, which Arasan won decisively. ctd has no opening book but played quite a reasonable opening. However, it allowed too many pawn weaknesses. 24. b4 starts an attack that opens up the position, gains material and leads to a passed pawn that can't be stopped Arasan was smashed by Ikarus in round 2. Ikarus played 1. g3 and Arasan was out of book fairly quickly. Arasan had a + score through most of the opening, but 31. bxc5 was unexpected and after that it was in negative scores. Ikarus pushed two pawns to the 6th, cutting off the Black bishop and posing threats. The end was ugly as Arasan tried to throw away material to stave off mate. witchess had Black against Arasan and played a weird kind of Nimzo/QGA hybrid (it is another program without a book). The game looked ok when I stepped out to run an errand, but when I came back Arasan had lost. 33.. Rxa3 was surprising - Arasan did not expect this, but also didn't see any big problem from it. 57 .. f4+ was another unexpected blow, much more decisive. Good game from witchess. I was still gone and didn't watch the game against Chompster. Chompster played 1. d4 Nf6 2. f3, which put Arasan out of book right away. Then it followed up with 4. g4 and 5. g5, which might make Grob fans happy, but can't be good. After 25. Rxf7 Qxf7 26. Rxf7, Black has two Rooks for the Queen, which Arasan was happy to take. Arasan ate some pawns and eventually pieces, to finish up with a big material plus. Next round, jsbam played some strange Gruenfeld variation and was in trouble right away (Arasan's score on move 7 was 0.5 out of book). Arasan won easily. Next game was Crafty. I remarked online that Arasan has beaten Crafty in casual ICC games, but has never scored against it in a computer chess tournament. I know Bob has been tweaking the eval recently and that has probably led to some decrease in playing strength. Crafty is still incredibly fast - it was searching 4 million NPS or so (vs. 1-1.5M for me). But Arasan was getting more depth in some cases (may not mean much because Arasan is fairly selective and you can miss a lot that way). Arasan played the Meran variation and was in book until move 23. The Meran is full of opportunities for both sides to go wrong, but against a properly booked opponent it seems to be drawish (in my experience) and that proved to be the case here. I had a little scare when Crafty's eval went briefly above +1, but basically it was a boring endgame, ending with draw by repetition. The next game was against Quark, which is a pretty strong program. Arasan got an advantage soon out of the opening (Ruy Lopez). 19. Nf5 looks strong and Quark failed low at this point. At move 23, Arasan expected .. a5, but Quark played .. Re6, and in the following tactics, Quark lost a Rook for a Bishop. Arasan simplified down, but in the end it had a rook file passer vs. Quark's one on the c file. Quark was able to block the pawn and draw by repetition. The 8th round Arasan was Black against Hossa. Hossa has been challenging competition in the past, but now I think Arasan is stronger. The opening was a fairly even English Opening. I don't think Arasan would play 18. f4, which opens up the King side. Also 28. b4 and 29. bxc5 open up the b file, which Arasan winds up occupying. Arasan's 35 .. Rdb8 doubled Rooks on the b file and led to a massive advantage. Against Glaurung, Arasan played a QGD Tarkatower. I was not very happy to see this opening since Arasan doesn't have a particularly good track record against it. Arasan was out of book on move 10 (older versions have 10 .. c5 as a book move but the current version doesn't). I am not quite sure where Glaurung went wrong. The culmination of a lot of piece manouvering and some exchanges was that Arasan had an outside passer on the b file, and this proved to be decisive. Overall I was glad to score 6/9, which is a personal best for Arasan in CCT. I greatly appreciate Peter's organizing and directing this. --Jon
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