Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 08:09:54 03/01/06
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On March 01, 2006 at 06:28:02, Tord Romstad wrote: >On March 01, 2006 at 05:56:29, Richard Pijl wrote: > >>Current FIDE rating between brackets: >> >>Johannes Zwanzger (2346) > >Yes, I forgot Johannes -- Thanks for reminding me! Strange that I would >forget him and not one of the others, when Johannes is the only one I have >met in person. > >Perhaps one could argue that Johannes doesn't quite qualify as a "top >programmer" yet, but the same could be said about Chris Whittington. Chris never had any FIDE rating AFAIK, which would mean he's for sure < 2000 rated. Last time i saw him play was in 1997 of course, he was about 1800 rated back then. Perhaps he was strong in the past, who knows? Yet in order to make a chess engine i feel the rating strength of a programmer is not most important. Analytical insight in chess is more interesting to have. In that area most European programmers have a major advantage to the rest of the world. Take for example Richard Pijl: 2400 7704389 Pijl R.L. M 1776 29- This national rating is about 2076 USCF or 1900 British rating. So considerable less than the list quoted above. Because Richard plays already whole his life in Dutch league, his positional and strategical knowledge of the game is much bigger than for example Anthony Cozzie. This where in a straight duel between Anthony and Richard, Richard really has no chance at all. Anthony is at least 2150 European rating. Or that translates to champion of some major city in USA :) IMHO the first basic skill you need is to be a very good programmer who is extremely good in debugging and who *wants* to debug his program. Only far after that comes the question: "do you *want* to implement more chessknowledge?". If the answer to that is 'yes', then having more positional/strategical knowledge doesn't hurt obviously. Most players who are 2000 rated and once in their life played the highest leagues, they all basically are strategically and positionally more than skilled enough to analyze the real problem. >I also expect Jonny to continue to improve rapidly, and it wouldn't >surprise me if it is one of the very best in a year or two. >Tord It would be wrong to not qualify Johannes as a top programmer. For example his engine has quite some knowledge and gets far over 2 million nodes a second single cpu at 2.2Ghz and it searches quite deep. Crafty 20.1 here for example gets with the 64 bits compile i downloaded from the web, at my 2.4Ghz dual opteron dual core, if i run it single core it gets only in a few positions 1.6 million nps here, and it has just a small subset of the knowledge which Jonny has! Please note that the ratings shown by the 'top programmers' above, that this rating is in no compare to the rating of a bit stronger GM. If i play for example some bullet against Smeets or l'Ami, then usually i take 2 minutes and give them 1. I lose nearly all games, meanwhile they are snacking and discussing the plans for the coming tournaments. Both of them are around 2550 now in terms of FIDE. So in absolute sense seen, not a single chessprogrammer is rated very high. We are utmost weak in chess ourselves. Vincent
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