Author: Moritz Berger
Date: 12:39:45 09/17/98
I am happy to report that the Nunn test of 10 opening positions developed by GM
Dr. John Nunn now has also been declared to be an independent (not intentionally
biased towards particular programs) means of comparing programs by Ossi Weiner,
distributor of Genius, Shredder, Nimzo and M-Chess.
While this does say nothing about the general viability of such an approach, one
of the most vocal critics of the Nunn test now has stated in an interview with
the German Computer Schach und Spiele Magazin that the story [about cheating
etc.] had been ended in a "satisfactory way".
Here's the quote from CSS June/July 1998 issue, page 40 ("Respect for
Grandmaster Nunn - an interview with Ossi Weiner”):
[translation done by my humble self, quoted with permission of CSS editor in
chief Frederic Friedel]:
---------------------------------------------------
CSS: The test was developed already in 1996, one year before Fritz 5 was
released.
Weiner: I didn’t know this. Only now I learned that the positions of the Nunn
test have been available since February 1997 when they were announced in an
article in CSS (the positions have been available for all interested readers
since then from CSS magazine). Myself and many others have overlooked this fact.
I assumed that Chessbase got the positions much earlier than its competitors.
CSS: Not at all. Chessbase, too, at first ignored the test. Only after the first
games became known it caught their attention.
Weiner: Nevertheless you must concede that not everything went smoothly at the
beginning. I would have preferred if the CSS editors had sent the positions
already early in 1997 to all important programmers. This would have killed this
whole discussion right from the start. Meanwhile I now had an opportunity to
talk about this with Frans Morsch. He assured me that Fritz 5 has not been tuned
on the Nunn test. That ends this story for me in a satisfactory way.
CSS: So you no longer insist that the Nunn test is a cheat, that Dr. John was
acting together with ChessBase?
Weiner: It was never my intention to claim that Grandmaster John Nunn cheated
and manipulated the test. The opposite is true, I feel a high esteem for
Grandmaster Nunn and I don’t understand how you arrived at this strange
interpretation of my words.
---------------------------------------------------
Moritz
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