Author: Ralph E. Carter
Date: 08:35:46 12/19/98
Go up one level in this thread
On December 19, 1998 at 10:58:38, Matthew Herman wrote:
>Although amir ban didn't consider this important enough to include in Junior5
>(nothing against him or his program .. its VERY strong), it is useful is certain
>positions, albeit very few, but still important.. for instance the famous
>endgame study w/ saaevedra .. W: Kc7, pc7 B: ka1 Rd4 .. white mates in 8 with
>c8=R!! but junior5 cannot see this because of that limitiation.. obviously
>promotion to a R is the ONLY way to win.. as c8=q is met by Rc4+!! and draws..
>
>Matt Herman
>
>I was wondering maybe if Amir could build a small patch that allows junior to
>see this?
Allow me to interject.
Probably, the speedup achieved by not considering underpromotions outweighs
those few instances in which it is necessary.
A menu option to enable this would be interesting.
But I don't know Mr. Ban's opinion.
Part of this chess computer hobby is finding faults. It is interesting. It
forces the programmers to improve. And it is helpful and informative to those
still shopping for a program. Doesn't everyone here agree with this?
In a similar context, after someone seemed to have found a serious fault in a
program (This is under debate. The debate can be found in rgcc under the thread
Re: Fritz 5.32: How disruptive to other engines?), Mr. Ban gave his opinion of
this fault-finding process, and the helpful people who post their findings.
After reading this, I wonder about his attitude to "complaints" such as yours:
[Begin Amir Ban quote]
snip
From:
Amir Ban <amirban@m-sys.com>
snip
professional programmers, all of whom want to provide their users the
best playing strength they can, more often than not know what they are
doing, and have no tendency to shoot themselves in the foot.
The message you read is just part of something the we in Computer Chess
like to do even more than write programs or play games: find reasons why
the result of a game/match doesn't count/is not fair/is not
significant/whatever. This one is reason 46 or so, and has just now been
invented. The objective of this game is not to improve your play or your
results but to prove conclusively that any result any program scores
anywhere doesn't count. While this game makes for interesting debate you
should not confuse it with anything actually happening in the real
world.
Amir
[end Amir Ban quote]
I then asked Mr. Ban:
If it were YOUR program performing worse than expected, would you want people to
know why?
I did not recieve a reply.
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