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Subject: Re: Dutch Open impressions

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 18:06:11 10/28/01

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On October 28, 2001 at 18:20:43, Bas Hamstra wrote:

>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.

1.  Does Crafty _really_ have the fastest hardware there?  That's hard to
believe with lots of 1.4 gig Dual AMD machines cheaply available.  But in any
case, it is possible.  A dual 1.4 is faster than a quad-700 for Crafty, however,
as the quad loses a bit more to overhead...

2.  Crafty may well have a serious bug.  Michel has reported that it will crash
on a deep think, which is odd.  There is no SE code in it, but it is possible
that something in recent versions has left a bad array subscript or something.
I am trying to get it to repeat a crash, but so far, nothing...

y



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