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Subject: Re: interview with Michael Adams posted on chessbase

Author: Robin Smith

Date: 14:12:16 06/30/05

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On June 30, 2005 at 16:08:32, Andreas Guettinger wrote:

>On June 30, 2005 at 11:34:18, Evgeny Shu wrote:
>
>>http://chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=2485
>
>
>Now this surprises me a bit:
>
>"I wasn’t really concerned about that possibility. In any case it would be
>impossible for me to tell, because Hydra plays a very different game to any
>other computer that I ever saw. Even in these six games it actually played
>differently to anything I saw in its own previous games, so it’s not easy to
>judge. But no, I don’t have any suspicions about human intervention. That’s not
>something that concerned me."
>
>A replayed the matches live on Hiarcs 9.6 and Fruit 2.1 on my 2 computers, and I
>would say above 95% of Hydras moves were suggested by at least one of them.
>Especially Fruit did very well in predicting Hydras moves.
>Therefore the sentence "Hydra palys a very different game to any other computer
>that I ever saw" leaves me a bit out in the cold.
>
>regrads
>Andy


Hi Andy,

Several people have mentioned this same basic idea:

1) "A group of PC programs can predict most of the moves of Hydra"

therefore

2) "PCs are about as strong as Hydra".

The trouble is #2 doesn't follow from #1. As a correpsondence player who has
used compter programs extensively for analysis, I can say with certainty that
even with as few as 2 PC programs, if you could always pick the strongest move
between these two program's suggestions, the result is far stronger than either
program alone. You see a similar thing with test positions; program A solves
positions 1,2,3,4 and 5 lightning fast but is horribly slow or completely fails
to solve positions 6,7,8,9 and 10. Program B might be just the opposite, slow on
the first 5 and fast on the others. The trick is knowing which program to
believe if you don't already know the answer.

-Robin



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