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Subject: Screamer is a Mac PPC chess program, compatible with ExaChess - Tourney?

Author: Richard A. Fowell

Date: 12:37:59 12/03/00

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On December 03, 2000 at 11:56:08, William Bryant wrote:

>Screamer build 55 is now available for download.
>
>Links are on the web page.
>http://pweb.netcom.com/~wbryant/screamer.html
>
>William
>wbryant@ix.netcom.com

Now that there are five Macintosh chess programs compatible with
the ExaChess 2.0 umpire program (www.exachess.com)
- Screamer build 55
- Vanessa Chess 2.01
- Sigma Chess 5.1.2
- Crafty 14.11 B
- ZZZZZZ 3.3
it seems like a tournament would be in order.

I was thinking of running a round robin tournament of
100 games per pairing at 5 seconds/move on my 7300/180
(1 gig free HD space, 50 Mb free RAM).  I want a lot of games to try
to get something with low variance on the statistics - this would yield
400 games per engine, which would be something like a +/-30 pt Elo tolerance
on the relative standings, I think.

I understand that running a tournament like this, on a single machine
without pondering, may not be representative of their play under the
conditions the engines were designed for, but it seems to me more useful
to collect the data than not.

I'd like suggestions on the settings to use for each engine
(unless I hear back, I'll use the default settings).
In particular
- what opening book?
- what tablebases? (I will definitely load the 3 and four man tablebases for
  programs than use them, but I don't have the room to load the five man
  tablebases. However, if there is a useful subset of the 5 man tablebases
  that would fit within a gigabyte, I could do that.
- what hash table guidelines? I have only about 50 Mb of free RAM for
   ExaChess and the two engines - I'll have to play to see what memory
   partition that means for each engine. I assume that "as large as possible"
   is the rule of the day for the hash tables (although, at 5 seconds/move
   on my 180 MHz machine, small hash tables might be ample and more agile.
- what partition of available RAM for programs with multiple hash tables
   (e.g., pawn and transposition).

Please let me know what you think.

-Richard



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