Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 14:42:04 07/22/98
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On July 22, 1998 at 15:44:26, Howard Exner wrote: >I don't have an ICC account. Are the top 5 blitz players all computers? >Is a computer number one there? If so about when did that occur? Good question. At this very instant it is: 3203 Vadik(GM) 3009 Vagr(GM) 2999 Ferret(C) 2951 Dlugy(GM) 2941 ban(C) Vadik has played exactly twenty games, which is the minimum needed to get a non-provisional rating. Whoever this is, he played 20 games then stopped, and hasn't played another one in the intervening three weeks. There was another account that did approximately the same thing, with approximately the same rating result. This is rumored to be Gary Kasparov. It is easy to see Kasparov and 3203 ICC and say to yourself that these go together naturally, but I would like to see him play fifty games or so and see where he ends up. He does not play computers. Vagr is Vladimir Akopian. He's play 449 rated games. I can find only one against a computer, Crafty, which he lost. He is currently at his all-time high, he plays zero-increment fast games against humans apparently. Dlugy is Maxim Dlugy. He plays computers rarely, also preferring to play zero-increment fast games against other humans. His record against crafty is +12 -31 =9, going back three years, and mainly playing zero-increment, which is insane. His record against Ferret is +1 -3 =3, at time controls of 5 2 and 5 3. Ferret is my program on a Alpha 21164/533. Ban is Junior on hardware that is unspecified. Ban used to be around a lot on weaker hardware, now that he apparently has something better it will be interesting to see where he ends up, especially if he becomes automatic and plays more or less all comers. He's been coming around lately, playing mainly computers, and doing very well against mine in particular at medium-speed time controls. It is hard to make sense out of ICC ratings. For a while it was pretty easy to get a computer over 3000, and now it seems to be a much more difficult thing to do. You see some humans over 3000, but they don't do it by playing computers, they do it by playing other humans at fast time controls. Seven of the top ten spots in blitz now are humans, and ten out of the top twenty, but only a few of these humans play computers. In the four years that I have been on ICC/ICS, computers have always been at or near the top of the list, but there have always been some humans up there as well, sometimes significantly higher than the computers get, and they seem to do this by playing really really fast stuff against other humans. bruce
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