Author: Mike S.
Date: 16:50:28 03/18/04
Considering the permanent topic Chessmaster/The King settings, questions which are best under which conditions, which ones should be tested, etc. I'd like to hereby propose an easy way to make the situation much easier. Actually it's not so easy, as a lot of testing will be required, but it can be expected that manufacturers do this anyway (or at least should do, or even are doing it currently anyway). 1. As usual, include "save" defaults for the typical user, IOW for the casual player, chess learning kids etc., to provide reliability for mentor and analysis purposes (in the sense of what Johan has explained recently), even on older an slower computers. I guess that would mean a selectivity of less than 12 and not too large transposition tables (but maybe at least 16 MB are possible by now as default, not 4 MB only?). In addition to that: 2. Include specific "computerchess competition" settings designed by the CM makers as the official The King settings for engine matches. I think these could afford to have a selectivity of 12 (and maybe some other values changed according to test results respectively), and a default min. hash size of 32 MB or 64 MB. These should be mentioned in the docs as *manufacturer recommendations* for computerchess games. (Then I guess, SSDF must "officially" use Sel. 12 too if there's no other way to convince them.) There are so many settings included in Chessmaster anyway, why not include an engine competition setting? It would help to get an "allround" estimation of the strength of a new King version quicker and better, when everybody is testing with the same setting (which certainly won't be the case when only "typical user" defaults with slow selectivity are included which are not interesting for computerchess enthusiasts, when quickly proven to be not the best for engine matches). It could also remove most of the doubts against rating list rankings of The King, where it's currently not clear IMO how much of it's comp-comp potential is wasted now, when there are no default settings optimized for that competition. I see no downside of (2.), because a so called typical user who is not interested in computerchess competition, won't be harmed in any way. For these user's it would be just one more personality among all the many others which are included already. He'll probably will not even take notice. Regards, Mike Scheidl
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