Author: F. Huber
Date: 09:00:36 11/29/04
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On November 29, 2004 at 10:54:04, Heiner Marxen wrote: >On November 28, 2004 at 17:43:44, F. Huber wrote: > >>On November 28, 2004 at 17:17:30, John Merlino wrote: >>... >>>The King is undoubtedly the best mate solving engine available, sometimes being >>>even faster than programs dedicated to these kinds of problems. >> >>Yes, ´sometimes´ might be correct. ;-) >> >>But ´undoubtedly´ is _undoubtedly_ wrong - at least _I´m_ in doubt about it! >>Did you ever hear about ´Gustav´, ´Chest´, ´ChestUCI´, .... ? ;-) >> >>Regards, >>Franz. > >Hello Franz, > >I'm sure John knows quite well about Chest. We both compared results of >Chest and ChessMaster numerous times for mate positions. >And CM is really amazing at it. While there is no guarantee that CM >will find the shortest mate, it very frequently does so, and faster >than Chest most of the time. > >The terminology is a bit confusing at times. >While Chest (and Gustav) are "mate provers", >CM (and most playing programs) are "mate finders". >The term "mate solver" is a bit ambiguous, so I would like to see used >the former two terms... well. > >Cheers, >Heiner Hello Heiner, of course I´m also sure, that John knows Chest - therefore my smilie ";-)" at the end of my ´question´. It were only these two words ´sometimes´ and ´undoubtedly´ which caused me to answer to his posting at all: From my test suite of mate problems I could easily give you 100 positions where Chest would be absolutely the fastest, or another 100 where the same is true for Gustav - and of course I´ll also find 100 for TheKing! So _who_ of them is really ´the best´? And therefore the statement "The King is undoubtedly the best mate solving engine available" is simply an exaggeration IMO. (if he would have said "... one of the best ..." - no problem! ;-)) BTW, in its default mode also Gustav is _not_ a "mate prover" - it uses similar restrictions as my additions in ChestUCI (e.g. flight squares and mate threats), and so there´s no guarantee for a shortest mate. This is only the case, if you switch Gustav to ´brute force´ mode - but in this mode Gustav is not really fast at all. So my (quite general) conclusion in short: Alybadix, Chest, GoliathMate, Gustav, King, Popeye ... (in pure alphabetical order!) is undoubtedly ;-) _the_ best group of mate finders/solvers/provers! :) Best regards, Franz.
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