Author: stuart taylor
Date: 16:44:13 01/18/00
Go up one level in this thread
On January 18, 2000 at 18:36:30, Heiko Mikala wrote: >On January 17, 2000 at 12:57:26, James A. Tackett wrote: > >> As a long time purchaser of many chess programs, I am most interested in the >>playing style of the program rather than its objective strength. I would like >>to here opinions on which comercial chess program comes closest to playing like >>a HUMAN master. > >The question of course is, how you define the difference between the playing >style of a human master and a "typical" chess program. > >If your main criterion is long range planning, than my answer would definitely >be MChess Pro. > >After watching hundreds or maybe thousands of games with and between chess >programs, MChess Pro has become my favourite program concerning playing style. >It is the only program, that makes you believe long range planning is really >involved. You will very often see it slowly moving it's pieces into attack >positions, transferring them to the king side, trying to control the diagonals >too and then suddenly launch the attack. This becomes even more evident, if you >watch it's main lines and evaluations. Watching it's main lines, you can see >that it really plans to put it's pieces into good positions. Watching it's >evaluations, you can see, that it not only moves it's pieces into good positions >by accident, but that it understands what it does and sees the advantage of >doing so. You can often see it's evaluation go higher and higher, the better >it's pieces are developed, while the evaluations of it's opponents stay low. And >you can see, that it doesn't give high evaluations for tactical chances only, >but for positional advantages and attacking abilities. > >For MChess Pro, at least 1 of every 2 games is a real thriller, mostly with >furious king attacks, and most of the time these thriller games are convincing >wins for MChess, where the opponent didn't have a clue of what was going on, >until it's too late. Of course, sometimes these attacks fail, but then you will >often see nice wins by the opponents, making the games still very enjoyable. And >of course not every game shows the above mentioned long range planning, because >it takes two to play a game, and the opponents are strong too :) > >If I say that at least 1 of every 2 MChess Pro games is a thriller, than I >should mention, that in my opinion this a lot compared to other programs, where >only 1 out of 5 or 1 out of 10 games is really interesting. > >Another very interesting program in this regard is CSTal (I and II), which has >been mentioned by others too. But the difference between these two is, that >CSTal most often only shows it's brilliance against weaker opponents (where you >will see really super-brilliant games!), but is often not able to play so >brilliant against equally strong or (maybe) stronger opponents. >If you'd like to see CSTal in action, you could have a look at FICS, where it >played using the handle "TheComputer" IIRC. I don't know, if it's still there, >this was some months ago. But there it showed, that it can play brilliant blitz >games too, I've seen some very exciting and interesting games played by it >there. > >Another interesting program (concerning playing style) seems to be Nimzo 7.32, >but it's not so much the long range planning, but more the sometimes wild play >that makes it's style so amusing. On the other hand, I've seen some horrible >games by Nimzo 7.32 too, that didn't look like a human master at all. Still, >Nimzo 7.32 plays very refreshing and is definitely one of the strongest. I'm not >sure, if one can describe Nimzo's style human like, I guess in most of the games >this is not the case. But some of it's games definitely are. > >Rebel Century plays very, very nice and interesting too, nearly always marching >forward, not so much looking for tactical chances, but more for positional >advantages. Still it's playing style is a lot different to that of MChess Pro >and CSTal, and I consider MChess's style to be a bit more human like than >Rebel's style. > >There are a lot of other programs, playing very exciting chess, but for >different reasons. Your question was for human (master) like style, so I'll stop >here, because I consider the above mentioned programs to be most human like (and >I guess I've written more than anyone would read anyway ;-) > > >Greetings, > >Heiko. If all what you say about m-chess pro is true, then how can it not turn out to be the the strongest program?
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