Author: Amir Ban
Date: 05:31:52 12/04/97
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On December 03, 1997 at 14:00:50, Uwe Immel wrote: >Maybe you find interesting, below a short statement about the WMCC and >the dissapointing results of Fritz 5. F. Friedel is a member of the >chessbase company and also one of the editors of a german computerchess >magazin. > >Junior triumphs in Paris >A multimedia report by Frederic Friedel > [snip] >The use of exotic hardware was not greeted with general enthusiasm. Many >of the participants had switched to 300 MHz Pentium IIs when they heard >of the hardware escalation. But some had not been able to make >arrangements in time. The Israelis, with their program Junior, had to >start with the slow 200 MHz AMDs, until Amir Ban called IBM in Paris and >talked them into bringing him a 300 MHz P2 into the tournament hall. > To give credit where credit's due: I called Intel, not IBM. They didn't have anything suitable but asked Gateway 2000 to provide a machine. Both Intel and Gateway cooperated with no strings attached, and were not even interested in taking PR advantage. There were some false reports about when I switched machines. It was before round 6 (CSTal). >The bad news > >The bad news (from our point of view) is that Fritz fared miserably in >this tournament. When playing in competition with other programs Fritz >has always had problems with it's openings book. In the past the books >paid little attention to computer tournaments and the ability of Fritz >to handle the positions that resulted. ChessBase always tried to provide >large, instructive and entertaining books for the users, and these did >not work against other computers. > >In Fritz5 our programmers retooled the entire openings book conception, >allowing very large books to be tuned by playing programs against each >other and evaluating the results. In preparation for Paris Fritz5 played >something like 1500 rapid chess games against other top programs. The >results were automatically incorporated in the openings book. The >success rate of the program in these internal tournaments provided ample >ground for optimism. However, in Paris Fritz hardly encountered any top >programs, and perhaps it was wrong to tune the program to rapid chess >games. In addition some modifications were made to the engine. After the >tournament it was discovered that in certain critical positions the >regular sales version makes clearly better decisions. > There is no doubt that Fritz 5 is a strong program. I can acknowledge that in the game against me it played a very bad line in the Scotch. I had it in my book, but starting at 10.Qb2(?),I would only play it as black ! >One of the conclusions that has to be drawn is that in a tournament >against middle-class opponents an openings book consisting of 7.5 >million positions can prove to be a liability. It is probably better to >leave the book earlier with normal positions and allow the engine to >unfold its power. True. It was strange how much the programs in Paris allowed themselves to be drawn into long lines seemingly out of control. I was really surprised by the game Virtual - Ferret which was crucial for both sides, and both chose to follow a long and weird line which probably influenced the result (draw) more than the programs themselves. I heard no comment by the Virtual team on this line choice, but when against Shredder they stepped into the Semi-Benoni due to some book mixup, they considered that a major catastrophe ! Amir
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