Author: Graham Laight
Date: 04:50:21 05/02/01
Fritz has been chosen, however unfairly, to play Kramnik. I actually think that Fritz is not a bad choice - in the wonderful clubkasparov challenge earlier this year, Fritz got a better score than Junior (and, IMHO, did a better job against the humans). Anyway - now that the decision is made, here are my concerns and action points for the Fritz team: * send a copy of the commercial version of Deep Fritz to Kramnik. Why not? He can very easily obtain a copy anyway - so sending it will do no harm. Meanwhile, you can work on the REAL program that's ACTUALLY going to play him! * add some code to prevent blocked pawn formations - especially the Stonewall attack. I think Kramnik used the Stonewall to beat Deep Junior at Dortmund last year. Crafty has got anti-Stonewall code in it, so you can copy that (it's in Crafty's eval.c module). * set up the program so that you can vary all sorts of parameters between games. Be passive one day, aggressive on another (I suggest passivity on day 1. Deeper Blue was aggressive on day 1. Passivity might have been better - only on day 1 can you lull your opponent into a false sense of security, then kill him when he makes a tactical error). Set the clocks to play slowly one day, then quickly the next to create time trouble for VK. Value knights above bishops one day, then bishops above knights another - and so on. VK must not be allowed to become familiar with Fritz's game - or it's "Game Over". * this is a war where "military intelligence" will count very highly. See to it that lots of disinformation is disseminated via various sources. * use the maximum possible number of processors. You'll need to have a lot more computing power than VK is used to playing against. If you need to recompile your program to run under Sun OS, Linux, HP-UX, or whatever OS you need to get a machine with a large number of 64 bit processors, then start preparing that as soon as possible. I can tell you from my experiences of making Crafty work well on an Alpha box for WMCCC 2000 - it's not necessarily as easy as you'd expect! * as you prepare your machine, use ICC (or whatever) to secretly play it against human GMs. Get Dutch GMs on your team. * this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Spare no expense. When I was a cadet in the RAF, I remember being told, "If you need a piece of military equipment, you get it. The expense doesn't matter." This is your war now. If the result is close, and you narrowly lose, you'll spend the rest of your life going over the extra things you could have done. In war, the first imperative is to win (though you must win fairly - you can't risk your reputation). -g
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.