Author: Don Dailey
Date: 13:22:56 02/05/98
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On February 05, 1998 at 15:08:01, Bert Seifriz wrote: >As all know Crafty had a bumpy start at Komputer Kup II, due to a >(let us call it) bug in the opening book. But in my view the real >problem lies somewhere else: >Bob is by no means the only programmer who would start at a world >championship with a program which is 5 minutes old. I saw >it myself that programmers made 3 overnight changes during a >5 day tournament, when they would have definitely better taken >a 6 month old version which had proved bug free so far. > >And I saw Fedex overnight express delivery of opening books >during world championships which contained opening lines at the >end of which the program would have lost a QUEEN for nothing. >To make it short: it is certainly better taking a well tested >program to a championship than making changes until the last minute! >Bert Hi Bert, Good advice. I have often come to tournaments with brand new programs that were still being written. It happened just a few weeks ago too at the Dutch computer chess championship and I think we payed the price. The tournament was held over two weekends so we worked on it during the week. We easily won all our games except the draw to Nimzo on the first weekend. During the second weekend we struggled in almost every game. Even though we lost only 1 more game it was enough to keep us from first place and I'm convinced the bug killed us. Ironically we did fix other bugs but none of them were as important as this one, or only affected performance. I am convinced this is one important "secret" of computer chess. Just go with a stable relatively bug free program. Most of our results are directly related to how well prepared we were. The only program that I ever really felt like I completed won the ICCA international chess championship a few years ago. It was fully debugged and had been functioning for months like this. We worked on it but wasn't "forced" to, everything we did was simple refinements. We did not work on it during or (just) before the tournament. We have won many other events too and almost always it was with a program that was quite stable and refined. The poorest results were with brand new programs. The only exception is the previous Dutch championship which we won but did not deserve to. 10 out of 11 but half these games were badly played by both sides. The current program is fundamentally better but even less solid in terms of preparation. - Don
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