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Subject: Fritz, Hiarcs... CB Updates Broken

Author: Ratko V Tomic

Date: 20:05:50 10/08/99


Over the last couple days I downloaded and installed two versions of updates
for Chessbase programs (2xHiarcs 7.32, 1xFritz 5.32 and 1xJunior 5). Well,
I am ready now to uninstall the whole "improved" thing and reinstall the
old and "unimproved" stuff.

Here are the "improvements" I noticed in about day and half after
the installation:

 1. The new search "feature" (bug?) while still in the book
    dumps the search info into the window where it used to show
    the opening move options. So, you can't look any more
    at the standard opening moves as you play. (Of course, you can
    still "Browse tree" but that's not playing a chess game any more
    but studying the opening.) The new "feature" kicks in at around
    3rd or 4th move and from there on they clobber the display of the
    book moves with the analysis.

 2. The program's moves were "improved" by an animated flicker of the
    piece the program moves. This improvement can't be turned off.
    Maybe they had five year olds beta testing (if they do that any
    more), since only they could possibly like that kind of amusement
    (to break the boredoom of having to play chess, I guess).

 3. The analysis window gets erased between moves with a different
    color than the background, for a fraction of a second, then it
    gets erased again with the normal background color. That makes the
    whole window flash as if a lightening is firing behind it. Again, my
    five year old may get amused by that kind of "special" effects. Anyone
    older risks epilepsy while playing fast games.

 4. Tried some bad lines in Hiarcs (which it loses right after it gets
    out of the book), they're still in the "improved" book. So much for
    "Weed the tree" procedure.

 5. The "learning" feature is as dumb as ever. If you turn it on,
    it quickly ends up playing the same opening line over and over,
    while if it had lost some game, it drops the whole big chunk of
    the opening where that line occurred, even though it lost for some
    other reason much later in the game.

    If you turn the "learning" off (and also set file attributes on
    the opening books to read-only, since it doesn't seem to respect
    the mere configuration setting to "no learning", I guess it helps
    them cheat on mechanized tests which turn the learning off; I am
    thankful, though, they don't require [as yet] the hard disk to be
    disconnected during the opening to disable the "learning" for real)
    -- well then every time it comes out of the book you have to wait
    however many minutes it takes it to discover from scratch the same
    move it discovered the last time you played that line.

    Is just remembering the moves played (at given level) without
    skewing the variety of opening play too complex to program? It
    seems by bundling together the remembering of the line played
    along with skewing the opening choices, they've tuned themselves
    to perform for the SSDF's mechanized testing (so they can appear
    stronger by winning the identical game ten times in a row, I guess),
    as for customer's convenience and time, who cares, let them buy
    faster machine if they don't enjoy waiting.

    Why can't they just remember the result of calculation from the last
    time (so they don't waste my time, thinking the same thing over and
    over with the same result over and over) without reducing the
    opening variety. In case they lose, they need to back off one or two
    moves (at most) from the point their score went negative, but not
    drop the whole Sicilian after they lose couple games in Sicilian
    due to the program's misjudgment 10-15 moves after the book ended.

    Now, for fairness, all programs, if they have learning, it's geared
    to give them an edge in a mindless kind of automated machine-machine
    play, while at the same time forcing their customers to either waste
    time on repeated calculations or to play the same opening line over
    and over. So this is not just a CB problem. I wish some of the folks
    who write these programs would try it out occasionally as a user,
    and see if they enjoy either of the two choices above. If they wish
    to get an edge through such "inspired" means, it would be enough to
    have an option for "mindless machine-machine" play and do this kind
    of so-called "learning" in that mode only. Customers are not computers
    who don't mind playing the same line over and over and who don't mind
    waiting for the other computer to calculate the same thing over
    and over.





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