Author: Aloisio Ponti Lopes
Date: 21:34:51 04/04/01
I remember the days I used to play blinfold chess against SargonIII running on a 286-20 MHz with 4 MB RAM and 20 MB Hard-disk, just to improve my "chess vision", as my school chess trainer once taught me. That was really funny, and it REALLY worked, I improved my game _a _lot. Now we have those wonderful machines, Athlon or Thunderbirds and Pentiums running at > 1 GHz; 256 MB of RAM is afordable, and we can also have 15 GB or larger HDs, fast video cards, large screen monitors, etc.. I bought the WM-Paket and installed the Nalimov tablebases... that's more than 2 GB of hard disk space that's only for playing 3-4-5 piece chess endgames - something that at the time I was using SargonIII I could not even dream of. Now I can test many engines against each other to decide which one is going to be my next "sparring", or which one I will use to analyse my games, as I can't pay for a GM to do it for me. Ok, I'm not a master, but I like Chess. I mean all "variations" of chess. Bullet, blitz, standard, blindfold, progressive, bughouse, random or whatever exists, I like it. No, I'm not a chess programmer, and I'm not a computer expert, but I try to test those programs for my own use, and for some of my chess-students (most of them are children). So that's maybe a different vision than the "experts" here have. I don't think it is nonsense testing a chessprogram using a Beowulf cluster of Pentiums running Linux. There are many other applications to this kind of test, in science (well, maybe chess is just an interesting algorythm to test those super-machines). I don't think it is nonsense testing a program using common affordable machines. I think TESTING is the only thing that I can do to decide which program I can "trust" more. So here's my humble opinion about this topic: I like to test the engines beginning with 1 minute bullet games because I think I'm testing the SOFTWARE, not the HARDWARE. I don't own a 200 Pentium-Beowulf-cluster running at home! ;-) I don't even own a dual!(I spent 10 months paying for a license of Windows 2000 Professional, just to get rid of those disgusting 95 & 98SE GPF errors). A faster software seems to be better than a slower one; also if it has more knowledge, it will be better than softwares with less knowledge. All that we want is the best of the two worlds, isn't it? Faster and smarter (fast searcher with as much knowledge as possible). Comparing this with humans: I have a friend who is a Fide master. If I set up a position and show him, he can "see" much more in 1 minute than I can "see". Maybe I could stand up in front of the board the whole night to see what he sees. Maybe I couldn't, and ask some friends to analyse with me. Let's say I can call 15 friends to analyse the position; maybe at the end of the night, our analysis won't be as good as the FM's one. I once read that E. Lasker did something like that in a chess club somewhere. Many chess players could not see what he could easily see. Capablanca once did it too when he was playing in Moscow; many "strong" chess players all together couldn't see an endgame path to win, but Capablanca saw it in a minute... I know of course that testing engines with more time is important too; but that makes me remember how foolish my analysis are comparing to my friend's analysis... well, if the position is just easy, he sees the solution and stops thinking. If it is complicated, he can write many pages about it, giving variations and verbose analysis that many often are quite difficult to "understand": his chess knowledge is much better than mine! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A. Ponti
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