Author: Fernando Villegas
Date: 11:52:34 04/09/98
Hi Moritz: Sure you are right. Enrique is right, also. I am right, certainly. All of us are right in our judgements about Fritz 5; all of us grasp a genuine side of it and let loose another or many. Personally I feel entitled to criticise Fritz 5 a bit because I love it a lot, as Enrique knows very well; I like his features, even the voice and his comments. (I am talking of Fritz, not about Enrique...:-) )To play Fritz is a total experience, an extremely funny thing to do any afternoon in the week end. Nevertheless I feel, also, that Fritz 5 does not perform well in certain situations and then it can happens that you lose very quick the verve to play and all that excitement, the promised land. There is nothing more depressing that being playing a game that suddenly lose all his charm because of a silly, irrelevant, unmeaning move. It happens to me that just after losing a pawn my interest vanish and even if I take back, the following is just a shadow and I suppose I am trying to be chastised because the take back, etc. Psychiatrist kind of stuff. The same if the computer do something stupid. Is in any of these situations that appears what I call “the law of decreasing performance”. Is say: After a bad move by the computer, the human side, instead of winning impulse to win, lose interest, concentration and acumen and all that decrease a lot faster and in a bigger amount than the lose of position of the program, so the human is defeated the same and badly after his own stupid move. With other top programs that does not happens. Not so much. They ever or almost ever play something relevant and so you are kept on your toes all the time and the final experience is a lot more stimulant. I play a lot better against rebel 9 that against, let us say, Owl or another freeware program hundreds of points weaker than top programs an even weaker than me. And that is the second law: nothing more difficult that to win a won game against a dumb program that seem dead and kill your fire but equally is capable of punishing you after a tactical mistake. The third law says that the precedent two laws are probably wrong as much as only apply to me or a handful of people, but not to all the universe of chess computer programs customers and users. Fernando, the lawgiver
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