Author: Roger D Davis
Date: 20:35:47 05/01/99
Greetings, I was looking at the news section at www.gambitsoft.com where the results of a major winboard tournament are reported. Nimzo is ranked sixth, after Crafty, Zarkov, Comet, Phalanx, and Voyager. My question is: How is this possible? Nimzo is a commercial program...isn't it supposed to be better than all these others? I mean, it's ranks high up in the SSDF list...if these other programs are better, what might they rank? Okay, so it's just one tournament...but, many more games were played here than in any grandmaster tournament, and we impute reliability to those rankings...no one says, "Well, there really isn't a significance difference between the top three, so having the World Championship isn't such a big deal." Weirder, on the SSDF, Comet is certainly an excellent and strong program, but not in the top tier of the commercials...yet here it's well above Nimzo2000. Even if you say that Comet's result is an anomaly, that still leaves four other chess programs with superior results to Nimzo2000. What gives? Is this degree of variability in the results really to be attributed to statistical sampling error? Should the makers of these various Winboard engines start arguing that they can hang (and in this case beat) the commericals and start charging $50 for their engines, since they're better than Nimzo? Should I start analyzing my games with various Winboard engines instead of Nimzo2000? Roger
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