Author: Howard Exner
Date: 18:45:15 04/17/98
I've started the process of putting together the data for this project. It will produce a first draft of test positions that will no doubt need further testing to eliminate unresolved (flaky?) positions and those that are too quickly found. With the help of Paul (from Holland) I have managed to download the files from the archives that contain the discussions on this ECM update. Reading the first of these posts revealed how the project began. It started out as a discussion on how programs were doing on the wac test and how that test was becoming too easy on today's fast hardware. Ernst Heist posted that he was working to obtain a subset of positions taken from ECM and Bob Hyatt agreed that this would be a worthwhile endeavor. Other programmers (Amir,Bruce,Don) quickly lent their support to the idea that such a subset of positions would indeed be usefull. The data began to roll in as programmers first eliminated many of the positions that were found too easily. Then began the difficult task of eliminating those with bugs. For this task Amir Ban took the lead as he posted a first draft on positions that needed further clarification. Basically he gave gave results that were categorized as multiple solutions, replacement of suggested first move with a better alternative, bad or buggy positions and positions that needed to be investigated. Bruce, Bob, Ernst and myself (armed with the ECM book) responded to Amir's "Errata" postings. From this many problems were eliminated. Common example's were the finding of a multiple solution as agreed upon by many posters but then the discovery that with good multiple solutions that the position became too easy. The consensus was to then eliminate these. Other positions with two key moves will be included as no postings made the claim that they were easy to find. So look for these as I will post the first draft next week (under 300 positions by a quick first glance). They still might be too easy. Another group of problems that were eliminated quickly were those that the book proved to contain a faulty line of defense and that Bruce ran for a long time and confirmred that the key move led to nothing. Again Amir alerted the group to these positions initially. Some positions were more difficult and led to much feedback from the analysers. These I will keep in as none of the postings were able to confirm or disprove a key move. For example I recall one problem that Amir said was bad and that I confirmed as bad because the book line was faulty. On a long search of this position Bruce found an alternative line that the book had not considered. The solution was difficult but seemed to work so it would be not right for me to delete this one. So in general the final list I will submit will respect the postings of all the players of this thread. If something was wrongly included or omitted it should be easy to find and fix.
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