Author: Ernst A. Heinz
Date: 03:45:35 06/29/99
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On June 29, 1999 at 01:42:57, Frank Schneider wrote: >On June 29, 1999 at 01:28:28, Jouni Uski wrote: > >>These superfast programs only got 3 resp 3.5 points! Specially P.Conners was >>one of the favourites before WCCC. I hope someone can give explanations. >> >>regards Jouni > >There was a very serious bug in P.ConNerS which was fixed after round 5, >maybe Ulf can give more details. > >Rainer Feldman argued "you can't prepare an event *and* a program" - maybe >he is right. As far as I understood, Ulf Lorenz did nearly all of the preparations for the tournament. Rainer himself said that he was hardly involved therein this time. Looking at the way "P.ConNers" played, I am convinced that it suffered from some terrible bugs. In the case of "Zugzwang", I do not think so. The program version seemed quite mature and the "Zugzwang" team was very confident during the first rounds (nobody talked about a lack of preparation then). In my opinion, the "Zugzwang" engine is just too slow to compete on par with the top sequential programs. At about 8K nps on a 300MHz Alpha-21164a (if I remember Rainer's statement correctly), "Zugzwang" is roughly a factor of 50 slower than the fast searchers on state-of-the-art CPUs. According to my recollections, "Zugzwang" was simply outsearched in its games against "Nimzo" and "DarkThought". Talking about preparation for the WCCC, I like to tell you a little secret. We were not able to do *any* special preparation because Markus finishes his M.Sc. at the end of July and I focused on writing my Ph.D. during the last months. The version of "DarkThought" that participated in Paderborn was at least 9 month old and is essentially equivalent to the one which played the test games listed on our WWW pages (see URL http://wwwipd.ira.uka.de/Tichy/DarkThought/). The program was mostly out of book after 4 moves or so which is actually not so bad as it may sound at first glance. =Ernst=
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