Author: Don Dailey
Date: 09:48:55 05/23/98
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On May 23, 1998 at 12:23:08, Bruce Moreland wrote: > >On May 22, 1998 at 21:51:52, Fernando Villegas wrote: > >>Then CSTAL seemed to me no more interesting and daring, but stupid >>and clumsy. Well, after that I managed to lose a lot of games to CSTAL, >>so I am now looking at it as a marvel again. Defeat is ugly, as I know >>very well each time I lose a hard hand of poker. Luckily, rarely. > >About two years ago my program got a few blitz games with IM Ronen Har >Zvi on ICC. He's now a GM, but he wasn't at that time. > >It had been playing very well up until that point, but against this >fellow it got completely smashed, it did the Kh1-g1 thing, it pushed >pawns and left holes, it dropped material in the center of the board, >etc. > >It got so bad that I started fiddling around trying to figure out if I >was running at half speed, or thrashing or something. I looked to see >if I was running the program twice, or if I had something else big going >on. Nothing -- he was just forcing my program into situations where it >didn't have anything constructive to do. > >It was at that point I discovered the phenonemon that you describe here. > A good player not only makes good moves, they'll expose bad ones that >don't immediately appear to be bad. > >bruce Hi Bruce and Fernando, I think all the programmers know this feeling very well. Probably also the general public who like to show off their new toys to strong players (or themselves.) My story happened at a US open several years ago in Jacksonville FL, where Rex decided to play in the speed chess championship. During the second half of the championship we got to play mostly Grandmasters and did amazingly well for the time. Remember this was several years ago. Each round involved 2 games, so we got to play each opponent twice. We never did worse than an even score against any of the players. So during the speed tournament there was time to play other casual games for fun. A 2000 USCF player decided to play a couple of games against Rexchess and demolished it. His playing style was much more "loose" that the style the masters were using and Rex proved to be a sucker for the slow burning king side attack stuff. We joked that this guy should be winning the tournament since no one else could beat Rex. But this was quite disheartening, and we learned firsthand that any program has weaknesses just waiting for the right person to exploit. My impression of Rex during these games was contemptuous, I was disgusted and felt like starting from scratch. But then we finished the big tournament with outstanding results and I was happy again for a few more hours ... - Don
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