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Subject: Re: Bionic Vs Crafty Debate: some data required

Author: Albrecht Heeffer

Date: 07:54:04 01/25/99

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On January 25, 1999 at 08:24:14, Fernando Villegas wrote:

>Hi:
>I have been amazed a little bit by the fact that in the long thread about bionic
>as a clone or not  nobody seems to have given data about how much Bionic is
>really something new or not, to begin with. The only thing that has been said
>about his presumed novelty is Dgeordge Vidanovic's statement that it is new;
>only thing that has been said about his presumed clone quality is the afirmation
>by Bob that a program that has changed only 1% of the code cannot be considered
>something new. Well, which are the data to support one or the other statement?

Hello all,

It seems like a good time to introduce myself. I'm part of the Bionic team.
I provided the hardware, worked through the test sets, added the end-game
databases and did some optimisations. I was present at the Open Dutch during
the first weekend.

Let me first clarify some things:

1) You want data? There is a complete website explaining a lot of details
about Bionic. Please consult http://www.impakt.be/bionic/ There is
also explained what was added and changes to the Crafty version
we started from.

2) All this was available before the start of the Open Dutch championship.
We did not hide anything. Bionic Impakt is for a large part based on
Crafty code, originally 9.26 and later based on 15.20. We never looked at
Crafty 16.x as some people suggested. If you want to compare, you'd
better use version 15.20

3) Hans Secelle is a good chess player. He added a lot of knowledge in
the prescan routines. The effect is most dramatic on the positional
problems of the Louget II test. Bionic scores 11 of the 14 problems,
Crafty 15.20 only six! The results on all tests we have perfomed are
on the website, including comparisions with Crafty 15.20

4) Bionic Impakt played on the same hardware using the same binary
during the first weekend and the second weekend. The fact that Bionic
scored better during the first weekend of the Open Dutch Championship
is a conincidence. However is seems that a Crafty-derived Bionic that plays
well is less acceptable by some than a Crafty-derived Bionic that score
badly. Also, discussion starts again after Bionic wins from Crafty
at the Winboard tournament.

5) The claim by Robert Hyatt that Bionic plays the same moves than
Crafty 16.1 is simply not true:

>Vincent Diepeveen sent me the games from the first weekend of play.  I picked
>3 as that was all the time I had.  I had crafty search each (on my quad P6/200
>which I figured was slower than the machine they used by a significant amount.)
>I had crafty search for 10 minutes per move, and if it chose the same move
>anywhere between 3 and 8 minutes as they did, I called this a match.  I got
>all but one move in those three games.  Not a 'perfect' matching scheme, but
>with the parallel search, it is non-trivial even on identical hardware.

Several people tried this also, including Marcel Van Kervinck and
Johan Havegheer. Marcel played through 513 moves and found that only
406 matched with Crafty 16.1. This test can be verified by anyone who feels
like doing so. We decided to post the complete loggings of the Open Dutch.
You can download them from: http://www.impakt.be/bionic/odc98.htm
You can inspect all setting, timings, moves, evaluations and so on.
If you really want to do this in a scientific way:
- do not use book moves
- categorise chess-evading moves, 'obvious' moves, 'only' moves
- do the same test also with some other program

Good luck,

Albrecht Heeffer






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