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Subject: Re: Short Report from Frankfurt (Anand-Fritz)

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 06:47:33 06/22/98

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On June 22, 1998 at 02:37:40, Roland Pfister wrote:

>I was on saturday at the townhall to watch Anand - Fritz and perhaps
>meet some computer chess freaks.
>
>But the only persons I knew were the two Matthiasses from ChessBase
>and Frederic Friedel. Frederic was busy photgraphing or videoing, so
>I had a small talk with Matthias W. and he told me that Fritz played the
>open too, at that moment having 5 points out of 5. Not bad.
>
>Then Mathias F. arrived, he was the one to operate Fritz. I asked him
>how they did parallize Fritz and he answered "MTDF", because they
>did not have the time to do something clever like Bob.
>
>He also told me that they had tried out the SMP-Crafty on that machine
>and that he thinks that there are still bugs in the parallel code: he had
>seen a PV ending in mate, but with a value of 2.xx !


He should have asked.  This is *not* a bug.  Remember that Crafty has a
capture-only q-search, and it is possible that a simple capture also mates
the opponent, but crafty won't notice this.  However, the PV-print routine
does check after each move to see if the opponent is mated, so it can add
the # to the mating move.  I see this on very rare occasions, although I
have not seen any game-related problems so far.  But it isn't a bug, it is
just odd behavior.

Should tell him that SMP-crafty has been playing for a couple of months and
looks very solid to me, currently hovering around 3000 in rating on ICC,
unless I break something before you check.  :)

>
>I told him that my program had played against a Crafty 15.10 (Killerchess)
>and that that Crafty had spoiled a drawn rook ending into a loss, and
>that it would be an explanation if that Crafty also ran on 2 processor NT
>machine.
>


most commonly the opponent didn't have the right databases, or didn't have
all of them, or simply didn't understand that position.  But it isn't SMP
related...

>But then games started: you seem to know more from them than me as
>a spectator. The hard/software that transfers the moves from the board
>to a videoing system is from a company called "Lost Boys".
>In the end phase of the first game with bishops of different colour the
>black king vanished from time to time and also moves were taken back.
>The company should call its system "Lost Kings" !!


from other tournaments, that system has more bugs than seems reasonable.
I've seen several events where a game stops getting relayed due to such
glitches..


>
>After a short break the second game started. No more vanishing pieces
>and a relatively quick draw. I had the impression that Anand had enough
>from computer chess that evening and a win of 1.5 to 0.5 was enough.
>
>Roland




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