Author: Chris Janeke
Date: 10:56:25 05/03/00
I recently downloaded the freeware program Chessterfield from Mathias Luscher's site, http://www.luescher-online.com/computerchess.html. The program is not very strong. It falls in the lower group of winboard engines, and is probably comparable in strength to engines such as Faile and Averno (I would estimate its elo at slightly under 1900). Despite its no more than moderate playing strength, the engine is special for two reasons: Firstly its evaluation functions were learned by means of a simple linear neural net. In fact, the author claims that it learned all its positional knowledge from games played by other winboard engines and by analysing some endgame databases. The learning technique used, is described in Michael Buro's paper: "From simple features to sophisticated evaluation functions" – there is a link to the paper (in postscript format) at Luscher's site. Secondly, the winboard version does not come with an opening book, but the engine seems to run perfectly under the chessbase winboard adapter where it can use any opening book created by a chessbase program such as Hiarcs 7.32, etc. In the Chesssbase interface it is actually quite an entertaining opponent for any moderate level player, but be warned, it's not in Hiarcs, Fritz or Crafty's league!
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