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Subject: It is good for the ego to win.

Author: Timothy J. Frohlick

Date: 18:35:35 01/22/01

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Mr. Villegas,

I recently posted that I played WinChess v. 1.0 on a 25Mhz 80386 with 8 Megs of
RAM.  I beat the program badly, but when I wanted to lose it was easy to toss
the game.  Sometimes one just has to experiment and follow a line to
destruction.  I do the same with one of my very weak checkers programs "Aros
Magic Checkers".  I can beat it 100% of the time if I want to but I will
sometimes try a risky continuation and go down in flames. It makes up for the
losses against Martin Fierz's Checkers Program which usually gets me 99% of the
time on my lowly 333Mhz PII with 96 Megs of RAM.

Winning against a moron is no challenge but it seems to bolster the ego.  That
is probably why us technical nincompoops are tolerated by guys like Bruce
Moreland and Vincent Dieppeven and Robert Hyatt.

Tim "Igor" Frohlick

On January 22, 2001 at 21:14:43, Fernando Villegas wrote:

>From time to time I am tempted to play a second rate program in order to see how
>I handle them after playing just top notch animals. It is kind of an experiment
>to see if the trainning you have got playing so awesome opponents give you and
>edge over not so strong beats. And of course there is the desire to get a win
>after so many loses or difficults draws. But the results tends to be
>disappointing. My experience is that after you have got used to play so good
>programs, playing a second rate one is very frustrating. Each time they play a
>mediocre or bad move, you feel your drive to play your best move goes down very
>quick. And being so, at the end it happens that the second rate program win you
>or you scarcely get a draw in an awfully ugly or stupid position and all this
>after losing an amount of time you feel you could have been expended best
>playing the real thing.
>In other words, if the second rate pet provides you with a less strong program
>by, say, 40% less rating, you, in those conditions, lose 75% of your own. So you
>probe nothing except the many ways life offer you a chance to lose time.
>BTW, second rate programs I do not mean neccesarily freeware programs. I mean
>obsolete commercial programs or shareware programs of the kind you find in non
>chessic sites.
>What's your experience?
>Fernando



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