Author: Heiko Mikala
Date: 18:18:08 10/20/98
Go up one level in this thread
On October 20, 1998 at 09:45:47, William H Rogers wrote: Hi William! >How about replaying the games without any opening books. Lets see how >strong the programs real logic really are. If a program is designed well, it can >play a strong game without outside help. >I always thought that opening books are fine for a person who wants to play >certain books to improve their game and in personal use opening books are >fine, but in tourneyments, they should be turned off. I know how you feel about this. In earlier times I played many games starting from given opening positions, to test my own chess program against other programs, or one version of it against another one. But it's much more interes- ting to play whole series of real games, and it's so easy today, using Winboard. Also I think, that every top program would be able to play not too bad even without an opening book. Even if you're using a huge opening book, you still have to implement knowledge concerning development, controlling the center of the board and so on. Every good program has to have this knowledge. For a long time I've been very sceptical concerning large opening books too, but I accepted, that they are a part of the program. Right now I'm having my problems with endgame tablebases, but I started to accept these too. Just a few days ago I installed tablebases on my computer for Crafty and ZChess. Now that I have them, maybe I'll even teach my own program to use them... ;-) >Your example where one program won without leaving its opening book is just >not any indicator of the programs true strength, it only shows that its opening >books were better. Yes, but the other program, the one that was the victim in this case, is said to have the same capabilities too... In fact there have been long discussions about these things again and again in RGCC and here on CCC. That's why I said "Let's not start another thread about killer books". I like MChess and Rebel both very much. These are both very good and very strong programs. >Thanks for the work and time you spent on the testing. It's often not only work, but fun too, if for example you see your favourite program launching a succesful, beautiful attack :-) Greetings and thank you for your comments, Heiko.
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