Author: Fernando Villegas
Date: 14:52:54 06/04/01
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Progress is a matter of fact for anybody that, like me, mainly play programs personally instead of using them to organize comp-comp matches. And it is not just a matter of hardware. Hardware speed produces deeper lines, but not better moves; improved programming does. We can see a clear improvement in that quality in any phase of the game. a) Opennings. The books used these days are light years better than older ones. They are deeper and better. In olden days you can face a program without knowing too much of opennings; it was enough not to do obvious mistakes. By now, if you do not know the precise line neccesary to keep the balance, you are lost. b) Middle game. Number of stupid moves has decreased a lot. More finesse to grasp positional points is also apparent in the best programs. They avoid a great number of antipositional moves they used to play in olden days. And tactical sharpness is crushing. Here hardware helps the most, but also better prunning and selective techniques. c) Endings. Clearly they treat this phase several times better than before. They already knows things they did not know. Again, in the 80's and even 90's you could save a game just reaching the ending, where comps some times lost his advantage. By now, the ending is a nightmare is you are not only a pawn behind, but just a time behind. A simple test of all this is playing a top current program with an old program in the same harware or even giving advantage to the old. 9 times of ten you will see the obsolete program falling in flames, not matter what. Fernando
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