Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 07:16:43 06/29/01
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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 It doesn't quite work out like that, which is why everybody switched to a chess 4.x=type approach during the middle and late 70's. The problem is, if you are selective at every ply, you have some probability of making a serious mistake by eliminating a critical move. This probability is a multiplicative product of the probability of ignoring a critical move at any one ply. The deeper you search, the higher the probability that you will simply crash and burn due to a tactical error. Remember, it has never been shown that Nxe6 is a forced win. It is a positional gambit that looks good. But since there is no forced win of material within a reasonable horizon, this is about positional judgement. Programs back then were still reasonable positional evaluators, they were just tactically inferior to today's programs due to hardware available and software decisions made because of the hardware we had. Belle was based on hardware, even in the middle 70's. It had a hardware move generator, hardware evaluation, hardware make/unmake move, software search. Chess 4 would require a CDC Cyber 176 as it was written in Compass (Cyber assembly language). Those machines are long gone from the computing market. Pioneer _never_ played a game. Never. It was mainly vaporware. Nuchess still exists. In fact, Dave Slate used to visit ICC quite a bit (handle=rusty) and he was still working on it 6-7 years ago, although I don't know how much he was doing to it at the time. It certainly played in some of the later ACM events, although I don't recall it playing after 1990 or so.
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