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Subject: Re: Dutch Open impressions

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 07:29:26 10/29/01

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On October 29, 2001 at 04:05:08, Tony Werten wrote:

>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
>
>>


I don't think the bug shows up like that.  If there is a bug at all.  Are you
using the 3-4-5 piece EGTBs?  That definitely affects the search speed.
Otherwise, no ideas here...



>>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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