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Subject: Re: What's der rating of der Bringer?

Author: Peter Berger

Date: 08:45:37 12/26/01

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On December 25, 2001 at 02:40:28, Lin Harper wrote:

>    Just downloaded Bringer, and it seems an interesting program.
>  Good on-screen statistics during the game. I found it is left wanting
>  in some simple endgame positions, eg, King and rook vs king, it
>  started making some ridiculous time wasting moves, repeating them,
>  in fact. Still, a fun program.
>     Under options, you can set the playing strength, with the highest
>  setting at 2400. Would this be about right?

Hi Lin,

the short and true answer: hard to tell.

The _long_ answer ;-):

Bringer is still quite a young program. Its author, Gerrit Reubold started
working on it in late 1995/early 1996.

So far it has only competed in three "official" computerchess tournaments.

In early 2000 it competed in cct-1 ( an online tournament featuring original
programs at ICC) where it finished in the middle of the pack with 4.0/8.

It was more successful in its second tournament cct-3 in May 2001 where although
there were much stronger opponents it managed to score 4,5/8 , beat Hiarcs and
drew Shredder and Fritz.

Later this year it participated in a live tournament in Berlin with an OK result
of 4.0/7. In this tournament it drew Rebel Century.

Results in user tournaments suggest that the latest released version Bringer 1.8
should still be about 50-100 points weaker than the latest released Crafty
version in comp-comp play.

Published results against humans are rare. It has played several titled players
on ICC with the handle "gambitmaster" though and usually did well against them.
But those are mainly blitz games. Its ICC rating blitz has averaged at about
2700-2800 recently .

The 2400 rating displayed should be about right with a Pentium II 300 computer
using ELO scales but this is still a very wild guess. On a fast computer like an
Athlon 1333 in a match with longer time controls against a human of 2400 my
money would definitely be on Bringer but it could be quite a tough match.

The weakening with lower values for strength ( like 2000,2200) works well but
those values should be taken with a grain of salt . In general they are all
about 100-200 points too high when we are talking low values IMHO.

With every new version Bringer has usually improved about 50 points . Bringer
1.9 should be released very soon and test results suggest it will be 50-70
points stronger than Bringer 1.8 again.

Bringer's main strength is its very selective search which helps it to reach
huge depths in a very short time. The search statistics often look similar to
Chess Tiger. Another of its strong points is its understanding of semi-closed
positions with knights against bishops IMHO.

Its main weakness still is its endgame play and its understanding of king safety
issues.

In most tactical and positional testsuites recent Bringer beta versions are
about the same strength as Shredder, Chessmaster 8000 or Rebel Century.

Although there still is a long way to go for Gerrit Reubold in the endgame I am
very much surprised by the problems you experienced in KRK endgames. Did you
save this game ?

At any rate : I enjoy this program very much, too and hope you'll continue to
have fun with it.

Regards,
pete

PS: The results Mike S. mentions in the "BFF" list show Bringer's performance
using the ChessBase interface with some "WinBoard"-adapter. Although Bringer
works with it somehow these results shouldn't be taken too seriously. The
adapter weakens Bringer's performance quite a lot.



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