Author: Christopher R. Dorr
Date: 08:16:36 04/28/00
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I have seen several people post the comment about Crafty's supposed inferiority to the commercials. I have not seen this. I am a fairly strong player (USCF Life Master), and play Crafty, Fritz, ChessMaster,and Rebel on a regular basis. Subjectively, Crafty seems at least as strong as the commercials. I know at least one other USCF Master who feels the same way. Objectively? Well, much of the data that has been posted here is in the form of 'I tested Crafty vs. Fritz in the ChessBase interface and...'. Bob has pointed out how flawed this is, for a variety of reasons. Additionally, Bob has optimized Crafty to play against humans. So I think that perhaps we should weigh results vs. humans quite highly when evaluating the strength of any given program. Crafty has 'put it's money where it's mouth is' by playing on FICS and ICC. Scrappy has established the highest rating *ever* (human or computer)in ICC by achieving a blitz rating of 3395 on 4/26/2000, after several thousand games. If it were so evident that the commercials were superior, do you not think their owners would simply gain the record over Crafty, and use it for marketing purposes? I certainly would. It would only be logical. The simple fact is that in this *universally available* forum, *nobody* has demonstrated a superiority to Crafty. No humans, no computers. It would be simple to do so, no? If they truly were superior. Now you can say that the commercials have other advantages over Crafty....much better graphical interfaces (Winboard is nice, but there are better), better database features (Crafty has none), or better feature sets (Crafty was *just* designed to play chess)/ But I disagree that one can say that the strength of Crafty is inferior to the commercials. It all depends on how you choose to measure it. Crafty on it's optimized platform vs. Fritz6 on it's? Tossup. Crafty vs. Fritz on the Chessbase interface? Advantage Fritz. Fritz on a Quad Xeon 550 vs. Crafty on a Quad Xeon 550? Advantage Crafty. Against humans? Against computers? Who knows. The only simple answer is that (in my opinion) none have demonstrated some incontovertable claim to be clearly superior to the others, in part for the reasons I have outlined above. Chris Dorr On April 28, 2000 at 00:01:05, Jerry Adams wrote: > > > Like everyonelse I own crafty but I never play it, Personally I prefer the >commericial programs much, much better. Not to take anything away from Dr. Bob >or Crafty, I enjoy watching Crafty play on Icc against Grandmasters, one of my >favorites there is Singacrafty which I think is one of the few Programs on Icc >with a "Real Rating", since it will play anyone, it doesn't careful pick it's >opponents to gain rating points. But let's be reasonable Folks crafty is simply >not in the same class as fritz, junior and chess tiger.
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