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Subject: Re: Dutch Open impressions

Author: Tony Werten

Date: 01:05:08 10/29/01

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On October 28, 2001 at 21:06:11, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>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...

Crafty doesn't have the fastest hardware but it's still quite fast. In the
endgame Crafty - XiniX I was outsearching Crafty several times by 3 to 5 ply on
a celeron 700 ! Unfortunately it wasn't enough to win, but it does seem to
indicate something is wrong in Crafty's endgame. XiniX had no problem searching
the same depth.

Tony

>
>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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