Author: Peter Skinner
Date: 07:07:02 09/21/02
Personally I agree with Bob on this one. For Ruffian to be as strong as it is, and no one ever hear about it until a few weeks ago is kind of suspicious. The results against the commercial products is what makes me believe this. There has only one post where Ruffian has lost a series to a commercial product. This to me sounds a little fishy. When Ruffian started on FICS quite a while ago the account used Fritz 5.32 via the Ebbi autoplayer for it's games, on a PII 300 Mhz system. A few weeks later out comes the Ruffian engine and not a single rating point difference came of it. It was doing well for the hardware and the program used being Fritz. I thought and actually asked several times about the hardware used and I was only ever told to read the finger notes like the operator couldn't remember what he put there. I remember this only because the operator of the account was actually very rude in asking for help getting the autoplayer to work correctly. He was having problems with the winboard commandline options for the auto player. So personally I don't believe this is a _new_ engine. Rather an _old_ engine simply renamed and possibly a few perameters changed to attain the results it has. I would not doubt it is simply Fritz or something. If I left any doubt I will say again. If you look on the "doubters" fence, I will be sitting next to Robert drinking coffee.
This page took 0.01 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.