Author: Bas Hamstra
Date: 15:20:43 10/28/01
Again many bizar events. While discussing how boring and anti-positional Tiger usually plays, with Jeroen Noomen, during the game Tao-CT, CT shot a h-pawn through Tao's left eye. End of discussion. Well, let's call the thing an idiot-savant, that's as far as I can go. Newcomer is EEC that does not use any form of AlphaBeta at all. The author tried to explain the concept to me, but I'm not sure I understand. Each move it plays a couple of shallow "matches" against itsself and some kind of pattern matching is involved. Eventually that leads to "votes" for different moves. The author says it has won some Blitz games against GNU. Also new is "Gadget" from Hans Zijdenbos, written in Basic. Since it is brand new, it has many things *not*. It has no hashtable, no pondering, no nullmove and believe it or not, no quiescence search. Very little evaluation. Now can that play chess? Amazingly, it does. Imagine Gadget searching 6-7 ply and Tao 12-13 ply, basically twice as deep. Yet it kept Tao negative for over twenty moves, with sound play. Cock de Gorter said the same happened during Crafty-Gadget. You would almost expect non nullmovers find positional holes in the nullmove search or something. During a deep technical discussion with Johan de Koning whether to analyze mates and countermates in the evaluation function or not, Jeroen Noomen drops by: "aha, a rabbit". Apparently an enemy knight at h7, that can't move, is a rabbit. We didn't get it, what do rabbits usually do? We could think of two things: a) multiply and b) disappear in a hole. Since there were no minor promotions possible in the foreseeable future and the rabbit finally disappeared in h7 I wouldn't be surprised if b) has something to do with it. Well, Tao scored 3 out of 6 so far, on a PIII-500. Should have won against Ant, which was positionally manoevred into a corner quite nicely, but alas, fell into the "impotent pair" trap which I have no code for: bishop+unpromotable pawn, and it became a draw. Finally: what's the matter with Crafty? It has the fastest hardware of all, but seems to do relatively poorly, what's the matter? The new SE stuff, or what? TooTheLoo, Bas.
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