Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 06:49:23 02/02/04
Go up one level in this thread
On February 02, 2004 at 06:16:46, Drexel,Michael wrote: >On February 01, 2004 at 22:39:20, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>Round 8. White vs Junior. Obviously this would be a bear of an opponent, and >>the game did not disappoint. Crafty worked up an edge after leaving the book at >>+.17 (nearly equal) to +.6 by move 16 (book ended at move 7 as Junior chose to >>not repeat the previously tried responses to d4 others played, and apparently >>listened to a comment by IM Schroer to play something different. Junior let >>things get a bit wild, and starting around move 20 we were hitting 16 plies >>every time and our score was up to +1.0 with some wild tactics. We ended up >>winning a piece for three pawns and then a very sharp tactical struggle followed >>where either side might have won. A well-deserved by both players result of >>draw was reached (perpetual by Junior) at move 64. > >Crafty never was in trouble in that game. Avoiding the perpetual was not at all >easy however. >Junior was not punished adequately for that weird Kh8 move. It depends on what you mean by "in trouble". Had junior picked up both the a and f pawns as crafty expected and as junior proposed a couple of times, I think it gets more interesting. Black ends up with a big king-side pawn mass and white has a bishop extra to stop them. It looked dangerous to me as the bishop is not the best anti-pawn medicine in such positions where both sides still hang on to queens and rooks. > >> >>Round 9. White vs Hiarcs. Another difficult opponent. Before starting this >>round, I chose to do something different with the book for two reasons. First, >>our 1. d4 had become pretty predictable and I didn't want to repeat the Junior >>game and possibly draw again.. I was concerned that had Ruffian won, a draw by >>Crafty would have given the title to Ruffian and I chose to try something a bit >>more dangerous and go with 1. e4. In fact, this was the game where I had set up >>for the Evan's Gambit but Hiarcs didn't play 3. Bc5 but went to the two knights. >> Had I prepared a bit more, I might have gone for something wild there as well, >>but I had not prepared any other 1. e4 openings. The Guico line ended at move >>15 with a perfectly balanced position, both programs showing almost exactly 0.0 >>for the evaluation. By move 25 the evaluation was up to +.75 as Crafty is not >>prone to "sit" on a position having been brought up in the GM quagmire of ICC. >> It continued to press this positional advantage into winning a pawn, but it >>reached a difficult to win (if it was winnable) ending with an extra pawn, with >>one rook left on the board. After a long struggle, this ended in a draw. >>However, I like games where Crafty is playing for the win and the opponent is >>struggling for the draw, rather than the opposite (which happened to us twice as black as previously mentioned.) > >Therefore it is better to have the white pieces ;) White helps, but crafty has this inate built-in idea of not "sitting". It isn't always a good thing, but it prevents some of those ugly human "squeeze-plays" where the computer sits around until it gets completely bound into a small knot. It does it with black as well. If there is interest, I'll put all the logs on the ftp machine. > >> >>Final result was 5 wins, 4 draws, 7.0/9.0 for the final result. Hiarcs and >>Crafty were tied, and Zappa put Ruffian down for the count to join the group >>with 7.0. >> >>The playoff was not something I particularly like, as the main event was 45 10 >>while the playoff was double RR 5 3 blitz event. > >I agree. IMO it is better to decide such a big swiss tournament by Buchholz. >Crafty would have been the winner, but you could speak of the others >as co-winners. >They definitely deserved it. IMHO we simply had a 3-way tie for first. End of story. That's the way we reported such ties at the old ACM events, until someone decided that we needed to award a first-place title based on Buchholz. >There are also some programs like Yace,Baron or Comet. They need longer time >controls to be competitive. I've always felt that Crafty plays better at longer time controls, as it helps to wash-out the very primitive q-search I use.. > >I played Zappa first and Zappa >>played a couple of dubious book lines and Crafty won both games (not easily, but >>it had enough horsepower that you give it a pawn, you can expect problems if you >>don't have some significant compensation. In the other two blitz games Crafty >>played, it drew hiarcs in both. The first was a bit of a struggle as Crafty >>chose a dubious book line but it was fast enough to hold on anyway. The second >>was also a rather bad Sicilian line and again Crafty struggled for the draw, but >>a draw was all it needed to win the playoff. >> >>Final impressions were many. >> >>1. Competition is tough. Everyone is getting stronger. You can't take a >>single game for granted any longer, in general. >> >>2. The AMD box is simply amazing. 8M-11M nodes per second. Most games >>averaged 8M or so throughout, after both sides have castled, 7M or so before >>both sides castle. Search depths were typically 12-16 plies, depending on the >>position. Open kings and lots of checks dropped the depth to 11-12 a very few >>times, forcing lines in the Junior game let Crafty actually search as deeply >>(reported ply depth) as Junior even though Junior counts plies differently. >> >>3. Luck still plays a part. whether it be luck that avoids a bad book line for >>you, or produces a bad book line for your opponent, or just searching deep >>enough in a critical position to see a win or avoid a loss, etc. >> >>4. Debugging is critical. No point in losing games due to bugs, screwed up >>time management, etc. Lots of games on a chess server can weed those things out >>nicely. >> >>5. A book is important, but not as important as "some" claim. My normal big >>book did just fine, with about 100 moves total in my "start" book to select >>particular openings and avoid others. >> >>6. Perhaps that "if they thought they had a chance, they would have come" >>nonsense can now be put to rest for all time. I ran on a machine that might >>have been about 1/4 the speed of the machine I could have used in Graz. Anybody >>that thinks that would not have been "competitive" is out of their mind. >> >>I've been doing these competitions since 1976. They are _still_ fun. :) >> >> >>And for Vincent, let me add the following to avoid all the discussions he will >>start: >> >>1. My evaluation sucks. >>2. My parallel search sucks. >>3. My book sucks. >>4. My simple q-search sucks. >>5. My wife is ugly. >>6. I'm too old and stubborn to have a chance. >>7. My kids are stupid. >>8. My mother used to wear army shoes. >>9. My truck is 9 years old. >>10. I don't know squat about NUMA. > >Wrong, your book didn't suck :) > >Congrats > According to Vincent my book _always_ sucks. And I used the same book you find on my ftp machine. I am going to rename it to itsucks.bin for clarity. :) >Michael > >> >>I think that about covers it. >> >>:) >> >>Now he doesn't have to add his two cents' worth, assuming he has two cents' >>worth to add. :)
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