Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 19:43:12 10/30/97
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On October 30, 1997 at 20:20:41, jeff wrote: >This game has an interesting position after 36...Kf8. >Here crafty played 37. Bf1 which really strikes me as just plain bad, >especially considering the resulting cage its king finds itself in >later. But I've looked over the other moves and find it difficult to >suggest something better. At first, I thought that a move like Bf3 ( in >place of crafty's earlier pawn advances ) might have helped, but that >doesn't seem to work out. Bf3 to keep the knight at bay, increase the >bishop's scope, and prevent the resulting pin later on. I really liked >crafty's earlier f4, dumping the pawn to free his bishop and break up >the black pawn structure. Does anyone have a suggestion? > >BTW, I'm amazed that I've never heard of this virtual chess 2 program >before...incredible player. It's always been strong. Won the French championships a couple of times including this year and year before last. My evaluation of it is that it is fast and plays solid. Reminds me a lot of Ferret, only not as fast as Ferret. This position was interesting. I've looked at it for a while myself. I simply don't like a lot of things that happened, but felt that Crafty played quite reasonably most of the time. Allowing the opponent a good bit of leeway at times (ie letting the rook and queen reach its second rank seemed risky to me) but it seems to know what it was doing. It just reached a position where it was losing, without knowing it was losing. The bad thing is it saw all of the opponent's threats, just couldn't find a way to solve them. The game this morning was probably the worst I've seen Crafty play. It is apparent that the evaluation is having problem with the search depths we are seeing in Paris. It is having lots of problems figuring out what to do, and when. IE it seems to be out-searching the eval and making some decisions that are simply not-so-good in this kind of competition. I don't think it is playing badly overall, because it has been doing very well on the servers both against good humans and against other programs. Losing 3 in a row is unusual, but not unexpected. IE I have seen it win 10 in a row from gnuchess, then lose 4 right back. As strong as everyone is an Paris, excepting a very few right at the bottom, losing 3 in a row is well within the laws of probability. unfortunately.. :)
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