Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 12:36:31 01/16/04
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On January 16, 2004 at 14:40:22, David H. McClain wrote: >It's a nice program. Thanks. >I have watched it play but someone needs to clarify whether you want to know >its strength against "free" engines or whether they want to know its STRENGTH. I don't see why someone "needs to clarify" how its strength compares to the commercial programs, but if you or anybody else want to find out, just go ahead and test it. It runs perfectly in Winboard, Arena, and all the different Fritz-like interfaces from ChessBase. Most people don't find it very interesting to run matches between engines of so widely differing strengths (I guesstimate the difference between my engine and the top commercial to be somewhere between 200 and 400 points), but nobody is going to complain or try to stop you if you, for whatever reason, want to see such a match. It seems to me that you for some reason think games played at home don't count, and that you need to play Gothmog on some chess server to estimate its real strength. The truth is rather the opposite. The version which plays on ICC is almost always more experimental and buggy than the public version. And finally, if you wonder why I and many of the other amateur programmers with accounts on ICC don't play commercials there: There is no point for us in doing so. If we want to play Hiarcs or Shredder, we can do so at home. Doing so at a chess server is a waste of time. Playing against amateur engines operated by their authors is something entirely different. If both programmers are present and follow the game, we chat, discuss our latest improvements and ideas, explain to each other why our engines evaluate a certain position in the game as advantageous or disadvantageous, and so on. It is much more interesting to chat with someone who knows everything about the internal workings of the engine and can explain what is going on, than with someone who has just bought a chess program and installed it on his computer. I (and, I assume, all other amateur programmers on ICC) have nothing against playing commercials. But we want to play against *the author's own account*. It would be fantastic if Mark Uniacke, Frans Morsch or Stefan Meyer-Kahlen had their own accounts on the ICC and played there regularly. I can guarantee that we would all play them as aften as we could. Tord
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