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Subject: Re: Fritz5 smokes Hiarcs 6 engine in 30' fixed match on PII 233

Author: Moritz Berger

Date: 16:59:55 10/17/97

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On October 17, 1997 at 17:16:37, Enrique Irazoqui wrote:
< snip >

>We'll see nothing really. 11 rounds won't prove much one way or another.
>500 games per program played by SSDF mean much more. In there F5 will
>not be so far from top. 50 points at the most if it runs with enough
>RAM.
>
>Enrique

We should maybe try to make it clear about which "Fritz 5" we are
talking:

- Fritz 5 on a K6/200 is slower than on my P5/166 (tested here with
Beta2 version of Fritz 5 in my Gigabyte DX 586 Intel 430HX dual
mainboard).

-> Hiarcs 6 OTOH is 2.5-3.5 times faster on a K6/200 than on my P5/166
(nothing to do with "good" or "bad" programming - just different
instruction pipelines/schedulers and HUGE difference in memory bandwith
consumption of the 2 engines)

- Fritz with e.g. 2 MB hash tables is 3-4 times slower at 40/120 than
Fritz with 100 MB hash tables (which also get sometimes 100% filled on
my P166 at 40/120 time control). Thorsten knows about this, of course
;-)

-> Hiarcs is quite insensitive to less hash tables, also when you use
e.g. Hiarcs 6/DOS on a 16MB RAM machine you get 15 MB HT, with Fritz 5
on the same machine (Windows also takes some RAM, add some for the
graphical user interface ...) you will maybe get 1 MB HT).

- Opening books: Fritz 5 comes with old (throw-away) .FBK books and a
(small, too shallow for comp. vs. comp. games) 100 MB opening tree on CD
which is not optimized for play vs. other programs.

-> I use Fritz 5 with my own 1.5 Gigabyte opening tree or the Fritz 5
PowerBook tree (600 MB).

-> The tree has to be "writable", i.e. on harddisk and not on CD for the
learning function to be able to store learning values in it. This also
makes a big difference if you e.g. play a sequence of 20 or 40 games
against the same (computer) opponent.


By chosing the "right" or "wrong" configuration, it is very easy to
manipulate results in favour of either Fritz or Hiarcs, I guess the
deviation would be at least +- 100 ELO points.

My advice therefore is: Never trust results where the poster doesn't
quote at least:
- CPU used
- RAM allocated for hash tables
- book settings (book type, learning enabled?, book source, ...)
- maybe also some figure like "it takes 20 seconds from initial position
with fixed depth 8 ply to play 1.e4" to verify the correct speed of
other components (2nd level cache, RAM settings and type (EDO, SDRAM,
...)).

It's all slightly technical and complicated, but without sufficient
information you are ill advised to believe *any* results of the
aforementioned kind.

Moritz

P.S.: Fritz 4.01 with 64 MB hash tables vs. Hiarcs 6 (Fritz-Engine) with
32 MB hash tables on P166 with Fritz4.fbk and reversed colours from the
same opening:

result: Fritz got 52% out of 40 games 40/120 with permanent brain
disabled.



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