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Subject: Note to James (Shearer) aka "fever"

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 05:50:37 10/08/99


James...  a quick note about your games last night.

I noticed that you played a huge match vs "scrappy" on fics...  70 games
total.  And that out of the 70 games, I found 1 draw and 1 loss.  Except
for the last 3 games, you were playing Crafty as it ran pretty much all
by itself on the quad pentium pro/200 machine.  I have an exam scheduled
for early next week, and the current programming assignment was due yesterday
at 5:30pm, so at that time, I 'disallowed' logins on the quad P6 box to
encourage students to not play around and get ready for the test.

What you saw last night was the 'real' scrappy without any student programs
running.  Scrappy normally runs at "nice 20" so that it doesn't influence any
student programs that get run, but they definitely kill it when they are
running.  The last 3 games were on a loaded system, if you could tell the
difference, as the backup process started running in the middle of the night,
and while it is only one process, it hurts crafty significantly, because I do
run 4 threads, and 4 threads on 3 cpus (still using nice 20 all the time) is
(for me) an absolute performance killer, usually being slower than if I used
only one much slower cpu.

If you want to play such a match vs crafty, on the quad xeon, that is easy to
set up and in general, the quad xeon will be 100% dedicated to playing chess
since it is my machine and I can simply stay off of it during such a match.  It
is about 2x faster (at present, although I am waiting on Intel to ship the 600
xeons at the end of October so that I can upgrade the processors to make it
about 50% faster again).

As I had told you, without students on that box, it is a tough opponent.  The
xeon is tougher and will become tougher still, soon.  But it is _very_ difficult
to draw/win vs even the quad P6 unless you are an IM, when playing at blitz time
controls.  And even then the wins are very few and far between.

If you want to try the xeon, let me know.

BTW the last game (the one you won) was exactly the right kind of strategy for
a bogged down machine...  the ending position was a 'null-move killer' type
position as it was generally doing 3-4 plies for 90% of that game, where it was
normally doing 9-12 plies in most of the others...




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