Author: John Merlino
Date: 11:36:17 04/11/01
After a couple of e-mails between myself, Johan and Hans Lykke, we have determined that, solely because of a misunderstanding, the SSDF's testing of Chessmaster 8000 has been faulty. The shortest explanation is that CM8000 has only been getting about half of the CPU. The reason for this is simple to understand if you have seen CM8000's Thinking Lines window, but may not be very clear if you have not. The Thinking Lines window has three checkboxes: White, Black and Chessmaster. Clicking on White or Black will allow you to see the analysis of the corresponding engines playing the game. Clicking on the Chessmaster checkbox will launch a NEW version of the engine, running the DEFAULT Chessmaster personality, so you can see Chessmaster's analysis of the current position as well. However, due to misunderstandings and (yet again) some less-than-stellar and more-than-confusing text in the manual, Hans had checked the "Chessmaster" checkbox, rather than the appropriate "White" or "Black" checkbox, to view the in-game analysis. Since the SSDF is NOT using the default personality (all they changed was increasing the hash table size to 32MB), checking the Chessmaster checkbox launced an ADDITIONAL engine, meaning that two engines were running simultaneously, and the engine that was actually playing the game was getting less than 50% of the CPU. We apologise to all members of the SSDF for the confusion and inconvenience, and hope that they will be understanding and start testing Chessmaster 8000 over again from the beginning. If not, then, oh well.... that's the breaks. If they DO start testing over again, then I'm sure that you'll all be much more pleased with the results.... Once again, our deepest and most sincere apologies to Hans (who has already tested CM8000 in almost 50 games), and all of the Chessmaster fans. jm p.s. Hans, if you would like to reply to this e-mail with your comments, it would be greatly appreciated....
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