Author: Ralph E. Carter
Date: 07:12:20 11/29/98
I have been playing some blitz games with Hiarcs 7 beta against Junior 5 and Fritz 5. Results at game in 5 minutes on PII-400s: Hiarcs 7b – Junior 5 25-9 Hiarcs 7b – Fritz 5 14-9 At first I didn’t expect to see such a slow searcher defeating this way the NPS monsters, but it did. Taking into consideration that game/5 on a PII-400 is roughly like game/90 on the 486/50 of not so long ago, the very good scores of Hiarcs 7 may be less of a surprise. Dear Intel is helping the slow searchers... I still believe that a relatively weak point of Hiarcs 7b is king safety. It seems that Mark Uniacke improved it in the final version, but the beta does things like this every now and then: In the 6th game Hiarcs7b-Junior5, after move 21 they reached this position: 1r1q1rk1/2n1bpp1/2b1p2p/3pP3/1p3P2/pP2B1N1/P1PQB1PP/1K1RR3 w - - 0 22 Here H7b played 22.c3, which looks quite unsound to me. With the rook in the open b column and these mean looking bishops, black could try to build a smashing attack. This is not a problem that Hiarcs has all that frequently. I saw it no more than 3 or 4 times in over 100 games, but it still is a weakness. When it happens, against other programs Hiarcs 7b can get away with murder, but against humans I wonder. Enrique
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