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Subject: Re: Mr. Iacovoni's idea: How to program it.

Author: Jeff Anderson

Date: 10:00:15 08/28/98

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On August 28, 1998 at 09:59:15, Robert Hyatt wrote:


>I hate to throw a damper on this, but it won't work, period.  The first reason
>is that if the tactical engine rejects the positional engine's best move, the
>positional engine won't have a "second-best" move to try, because alpha/beta
>doesn't produce that.  To obtain it, you have to do a full re-search, but with
>the rejected best move eliminated from consideration.

As you can probably tell my understanding of computerchess is not nearly as
great as my interest, but when I have Fritz5 'watch' a position it has a list
move moves it analyses, I can have it analyse 1 move, or all the legal moves in
the position.  Now if I had another computer right next to me doing the same
thing, but with a different engine all I have to do is follow a few simple rules
and I can produce my move.  With a history in computer chess like yours you
ought be able to think of some even better way to to combine to chess engines
with very different styles.


>To make this work, you take a *huge* performance hit, and will play far worse
>than if you do what we are doing now...

Yes, each engine would only have half of the hardware use than if it were just
that engine alone, but in this day and age technology is progressing very
rapidly.  I look at some of the hardware being used by chess computers on ICC
and am amazed, quite a bit of the programs are running on very fast computers
with multiple CPU's.  On computers like these I think that two very unique chess
engines, probably a tactical engine and a positional engine, working together
efficiently would be able to play a very good game of chess.
It is so simple, the tactical engine checks for blunders in the positional
engines analysis, and it also checks for shots and such, and the positional
engine will be slow but have a huge wealth of chess knowledge.  I think that the
engines would compliment eachother and perform better than programs that do it
all in one today.

Perhaps someone could try it at home with Fritz 5 and Hiarcs in 'watch' in Fritz
5.  Though these engines are far from ideal because they were designed to work
on their own and (Hiarcs must have comprimised some of it's knowledge to be able
to see blunders, and Fritz 5 must have comprimised some of its speed to not look
like an ass in closed positions), this would still prove that the idea is
workable.

Jeff



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