Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 20:53:31 04/19/00
As I had mentioned a while back, I have a sack full of quad xeon 550 machines in a beowulf cluster. While waiting on a few final pieces to arrive, I decided to do what I thought was an interesting test: two identical machines, and I mean _identical_. Quad xeon 550's, 27 gigs of SCSI disks in a raid-0 (striping) configuration, 512mb of ram, etc. IE everything is identical, with all the 3-4-5 piece compressed tablebases, same opening books, etc. The only difference was that 'crafty' plays computers and humans, while scrappy only plays humans. Several of us had postulated over the years that if you only play humans, you can drive your rating through the roof. Using the same formulas (5 3 blitz or faster, 60 60 standard or faster, or most any bullet) I have been watching the two programs for a month now. And they seem to hover at the point scrappy == crafty+100, roughly. Standard has crafty actually higher, but that is because crafty is playing standard against computers, while scrappy is playing very little standard as humans seem to be avoiding that for the most part... and those that do play standard play crafty as it is better known. 100 points was a surprise... as I thought it would be more. At present crafty is at 31126 and scrappy is at 3219 blitz (which is the most stable ratings since most games are blitz). It seems that not playing computers is _not_ a way to grossly inflate your rating, unless you consider 100 as inflated. Note that a rating of 3200 is very high, considering that there are not a lot of GM players that are rated even 3000. I watched scrappy play a 16 game match earlier this week, it won 8 games, lost one, then one 7 more, for a 15-1 result (5 3 blitz). It lost 32 rating points for the effort. :) I am going to continue the experiment until I get the rest of the beowulf hardware (another quad box and a fast ethernet switch to complement the giganet switch). If you watch the ratings, you will get a feel for the difference in playing only humans and humans + computers...
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