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Subject: Re: Good example of paradigm shift thinking

Author: Thorsten Czub

Date: 18:41:48 11/08/00

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On November 08, 2000 at 20:47:22, Christophe Theron wrote:

>>We don't know what were Christophe's sources. He may never have even had a copy
>>of CSTal.



>I have a copy of CSTal that I have bought in 1997 after the Paris Championship.
>Just after the championship, I ran to the nearest "FNAC" store in Paris and
>bought it.

:-))))) an OSCAR to christophe ! how much did we pay you for this answer :-)))

>I installed on my sister's computer (she lives in France) but did not try it
>seriously (I had to go back to Guadeloupe a few days after and had other things
>to do).

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh. send the money back we paid you christophe :-)) that was the
wrong sentence !!

>Since then, I must admit to my own shame, that I have never installed it.

why did you ran into the shop and bought it ?

>I
>thought I would install it with the purpose of test-stressing my king safety
>code, but I never worked seriously on king safety since 1997. And anyway my KS
>code was so stupid that even Genius5 or Fritz2 was stressing it badly.

:-))


>My motivation for the change I have done (which is the ground of Gambit Tiger)
>is that Thorsten Czub, Enrique Irazoqui, Marcus Kästner and Ed have been
>repeatedly insisting since a long time Tiger
>* was playing passively
>* had no idea of what was happening when the opponent was building a strong king
>attack against it (especially human players)

as i said: a programmer that listens !! very rare !
:-)))

>I have started to rewrite TOTALLY the part of Tiger's evaluation that deals with
>king attacks one month before the release of Rebel-Tiger II. My hope was to
>improve Tiger on this matter before the release, but I thought deep inside that
>it was impossible to do such a dramatic change in such a short time.

right. you did not expect it to play that strong.
it was not planned to be that strong. but ---- i think you also
did not expect tiger 11.2 to be that strong.

christophe : you seem to be often unsure about what great stuff you
work out. be careful what you throw in your trash !


>Just one week before the deadline, I had a version that was able to play wild
>games and caused a lot of trouble to good old Genius5 and others. It was time
>for the release of the second beta of the product, so I decided that I would
>provide this new unfinished engine "just for fun" as an additional engine.

:-))))

> I
>named it Gambit Tiger 0.95. At the same time, a little bit of the new knowledge
>of Gambit Tiger has been added to the classic Chess Tiger (which was version
>12.95).

>Almost immediately (a few hours after the release to the beta test team), the
>beta testers started to report that they liked a lot this new engine and that it
>was getting good results.

:-))

faster than light speed. like rumours on the enterprise : kirk sleeps with ...?!


>I was expecting the good "emotional" reaction (because I like myself a lot the
>Gambit playing style), but not the good results.


:-)))

>The efficiency of Gambit Tiger is a total surprise for me. Call me lucky. But
>now I must convert the luck to deserved luck, so I try hard to understand what's
>going on, and I have to reconsider many things I considered as "truth".


exactly.

>It is not the first time I have to change my mind deeply. It happened to me on a
>regular basis since I work on chess programs.

that is IMO one of your main strength christophe ! you reevaluate your
point of views !


>It was hard at the beginning, but
>now I'm used to it. So I can stand it.

:-))

>> But that wasn't important, he ony had to be open to the ideas behind
>>it. And these ideas were 'open-source', spoken about many times. Likely he
>>didn't even consciously think of CSTal, but, when his surprising results came
>>from his act of daring, he already had the language, the words, to help form his
>>ideas.

>I have nothing yet. I have discovered an anomaly, I was not prepared to it, and
>I'm now slowly rebuilding my "knowledge net" to include this anomaly.

:-)))

>I have several hypothesis to explain why it worked when I thought it wouldn't,
>but I still don't know which one is correct, or if several are correct, or if
>none will help.


time will tell.


>This is not exceptional. I have noticed during the years a number of other
>"anomalies" which I'm still trying to explain.

:-))))))))

you call it anomalie, i would call it genius-intuitions.


>Chess Tiger and Gambit Tiger use a number of basic principles. Some of them are
>logical and indeed work well. Some of them are not logical and I don't know why
>they work. I wonder if I'll know one day. Some of them do not work, but I'm not
>aware of it yet and I keep on using them while I shouldn't.

:-)))

>Most of the time I'm not able to say in which category a given principle
>belongs. Just to give you an idea of the strength of my convictions about chess
>programming, and the level of doubt and uncertainty I am used to work with.

>When you have to work under these conditions, then you are more than happy to be
>able to count some beans. Sometimes it's the only way to make the right choices.

>I believe all the other good chess programmers have to work this way, and are as
>capable as me to manage thru the fog.

>    Christophe

right. thats IMO the right spirit. the competition is open. we will see.

what happens...

what will they doooooooooooooooooooo...




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