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Subject: Re: Thinker 4.6b third after 1st round!

Author: Sune Fischer

Date: 09:30:50 06/02/04

Go up one level in this thread


On June 02, 2004 at 11:49:48, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>>Don't complain about it saying that's not how it meant to be played.
>>If you won't acknowledge that the user is boss at his end then don't release the
>>engine to him.
>
>That's a completely nonsensical approach to anything.  I designed Crafty with
>one goal in mind, playing chess.  Crafty is a "package".  Its book.  Its
>learning.  Its search.  Its evaluation.  Its pondering.  Breaking any of those
>makes little sense since it becomes "not crafty" at that instant.

Ok that is your privilege, but take Mr. Smith here he is a very strong player
and in the need for good engine to help him analyse his games.

Mr. Smith has never heard of the computer chess club and couldn't care less
about computer games. All Mr. Smith needs is an engine that will assist him in
his analysis.

As it happens Mr. Smith asks me for advice, now, should I tell him that Crafty
can't do analysis because Crafty is a "chess playing system" and he _must_ do
analysis with ponder ON (whatever in the world that means) and he must enable
learning before beginning analysis (whatever effect that would have?)?

I guess I have to recommend some other engine to him, I don't want him to misuse
Crafty for something it wasn't intended to do of course!


>>There are problems with determanistic behavior of the engines.
>
>And there are problems with non-deterministic behavior of books.

Which is why I do nunn based tests, but that's a different story for some other
time.

>
>>
>>>Why not play with a
>>>common (bad) book?
>>
>>Done often.
>
>
>And just as worthless of course,

Not "just" as worthless, it's a little less worthless. A step in the right
direction if you will.

>>> But certainly don't play with a book hand-tuned to program A
>>>and program B might well do poorly with it.
>>
>>Why not, it might help you locate weaknesses.
>
>
>A person playing a basement tournament is not trying to fix weaknesses.  That is
>where this thread started.  Not on author testing, which is a different thing
>entirely...

I have found many bugs due to a lot of helpful tournament holders, so that's
just outright false.

>If turning off learning gets it kicked out, that's fine by me.  I didn't write
>it to participate in oddball-configured basement events.  I wrote it as a
>stand-alone system to play chess.

What should Mr. Smith do about that?

-S.



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