Author: Steve Maughan
Date: 10:53:46 11/14/03
Go up one level in this thread
Martin, In my view the answer is both hardware and software :-). Although I think the software improvements have been quite spectacular and IMO more interesting. The two main software trends that I've seen over the last three years are: 1) Increased focus on King Safety. Of course it has always been important but it seems as if the programmers have all reaped considerable benefit by focusing on and improving this area of their programs. I would say Christophe Theron can take quite a bit of credit for starting this recent trend when he introduced Gambit Tiger, which started beating other PC "differently". Other examples of this trend has been the development of the custom personalities - where many (all?) of the stronger ones for CM etc have much higher than average King Safety. 2) More aggressive pruning algorithms which bring down the branching factor. The engines of today (e.g. Shredder) seem to have very low branching factors that are a results of aggressive and effective forward pruning. This allows them to make better use of the additional speed provided by the hardware. Regards, Steve
This page took 0 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.