Author: Djordje Vidanovic
Date: 03:21:26 12/19/03
As I had been away from my computer for a while, I only read the long threads regarding Ruffian 2.0 last night. I feel obliged to give some new information regarding the thread and the advertisement in which Ruffian 2.0 is labelled as the strongest Winboard engine available. First of all, this very laudable description of Ruffian 2.0 was not produced by Per-Ola. Per-Ola actually wrote in his text that Ruffian is "a strong Winboard and UCI engine", nothing more. Thus, I agree with many of you who thought that the wording was too pompous (to say the least). However, there are a couple of mitigating circumstances. At the time the wording was being assembled Rebel 12 had not yet appeared as a WB engine, and The King (a.k.a. Chessmaster) was used as a WB engine in highly questionable ways (without its proprietary endgame bases, without its proprietary book; but, rather unbecomingly, like some hacked-up version of an otherwise magnificent program (this is not laying it on thick, I really mean it). As for the third program that was also mentioned as a strong WB engine, Deep Sjeng 1.5, I have my own testing evidence, which I will be bold enough to present to you (I will not supply the games as I have pitted Ruffian and DS purely for my investigative purposes; to find out if there are any vulnerabilities in the Noomen book). My evidence comprises more than 1,000 games played at G/5, G/10, G/15, G/30, G/45, played on a dual AMD MP system (MP 2000+, 1 GB RAM, Windows XP Pro, hash 128 MB each, 3-4-5 tablebases included). So far the score of this very long match has clearly favoured Ruffian 2.0 (firmly standing between 61-62%, indicating a rating margin of about 80+ ELO between the two). The same dual system hosted DS against a Barton 2800+ (single cpu system) and Ruffian was winning again (this time only 300 games played at G/10). The dual version of Deep Sjeng 1.5 was getting 46% against the single cpu Ruffian 2.0. Thus, we might say that Ruffian was not only keeping DS at bay, it was slowly and surely breaking down DS as the match went on. These are facts and I stand behind them. I do have all the pgns and I was the one to have supervised the matches, or most of them, at the Faculty of Electronics, University of Nis, Serbia. My friend and associate, Vladan Vuckovic (Axon programmer) was involved in the testing too. Again, I am sorry that the ad came out the way it did, and I am also rather sad at the fact that I was not around to try and reply to some well-founded criticism directed at Frank Quisinsky. I think that Frank was well-intentioned but also that he has to learn a lot about the ways of the world, especially the world of business. One more thing: it would be very easy to fend off any suer who tried to complain about Ruffian and its prospective results. Just on the basis of the phrase used "... strongest Winboard engine AVAILABLE", which was true at the time Ruffian's ad came out: no Rebel yet, DS clearly the less potent of the two, The King not a properly distributed WB engine. Still, let me say it again: I believe that many complaints made here make a lot of sense and I also believe that the text in the ad must have been less conspicuous and less assertive. Best regards to all, Djordje
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