Author: David Blackman
Date: 02:22:11 06/29/01
Go up one level in this thread
On June 29, 2001 at 03:18:19, Joshua Lee wrote: >I have to disagree about Chaos not doing well against top programs in tactics >this may be another story but if you look at so few nodes to begin with and are >ported to something 100+ times faster you should be able to see that much >better/furthur and if programs like Hiarcs 7.32 don't find a move like Nxe6 in >17+minutes and it takes millions of nodes, or Gandalf (also Phalanx) at best >under a minute but with still 400,000+ nodes logic tells me that the other >program is doing better with less. Now reality may be a little bit different for >1 i don't think Chaos is available for 2 Belle , Chess 4x (Nuchess) might still >be available and they beat Chaos. However are they better positionally? > >It would be nice if possible to get these old programs and see how they do >against top programs now. Pioneeer, hitech, Nuchess etc ..... > >Thankyou There is a fair bit of suspicion that the famous Chaos Nxe6 was due to a bug. I heard third hand that someone who was there asked one of the Chaos programmers why it made this brilliant move, the answer was "I don't know, but when I find out, that's one bug I'm going to fix." It's actually quite easy to write a program that makes brilliant sacrifices like this with very little tree searching. The only trouble is, it also makes a lot of brilliant looking sacrifices that don't actually work. Go through some of the games Chaos played, and get them commented by Fritz. You're going to find that Chaos made heaps of tactical mistakes and Fritz will find most of them in about a millisecond. All of these older programs would get smashed by any decent modern program. There are two reasons for this. 1. We know a lot more now about writing strong programs. 2. Playing a program designed for a 1 MIPS computer on a 1000 MIPS computer doesn't get you as much advantage as you think, because it just isn't written to take advantage of that much power. In fact it can even get worse due to bugs showing up that don't matter at slower speeds. For the other old programs you list: Pioneer never existed as an actual program. It has been suggested that it never even existed as a complete paper design, but that is hard to verify either way. Hitech and the better versions of Belle only worked on special hardware. They won't run on any normal computer, although the hardware they ran on may still exist in a closet somewhere and is only about ten times slower than a modern cheap PC. Chess 4.X was in CDC-6600 assembly language. It won't run on anything modern. Nuchess was Fortran, so it would run without much trouble. It would also be one of the better old programs, since it was very solid and had a well-tuned eval. It would not be competitive with modern programs because it didn't have null-move or anything equivalent so it's going to do at least 2 plies less than anything modern when running on modern hardware. Elsewhere in the thread someone said Kaissa is in Fortran, and probably still exists. This may be the most interesting of the old programs in a lot of ways. Bob still has some runnable versions of Cray Blitz i think, but probably not really old ones.
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