Author: Roger D Davis
Date: 13:14:35 07/15/05
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On July 15, 2005 at 14:25:54, Robert Hollay wrote: > > It's July. The holiday season. I decided to visit P.M., who lives in a near >town, 23 km-s from me. He's 31 years old, single. > It was very hard to persuade him to this interview. He's a very withdrawn and >humble man, doesn't like popularity. He asked me to keep his name secret... > > >The text of the interview: >(sorry for the spelling mistakes, I'm not a native speaker of English) > >R.H.: When you started playing computer chess? >P.M.: I was 13 when my elder brother gave me his Commodore64. From the > beginning I was only interested in chess games. At that time I was > belonging to the second class of the primary school. > After one month of practice I easily thrashed chess programs like > Grandmaster or Colossus 4.0. >RH: Of course you regularly won games against your pals as well... >PM: I never had pals. >RH: Ehmm ... I see... >PM: At the age of 21, when I had finished the fourth class of the primary > school, Daddy bought me a PC! Grandma installed Windows 95 on it. > I obtained as many chess programs as I could and began playing chess. > Very soon I was able to beat them all, systematically. >RH: Didn't you try to make money of your talent? >PM: Money means nothing to me. I'm playing chess against comps only for fun. >RH: But what do you live on? >PM: We live on my Granny's pension. >RH: Do you have any girl-friends? >PM: Well ... there used to be one ... Julia. We got on well together. > Several times she came up to my room, and she used to play chess > amazingly well! > Julia had got a laptop, which she usually brought along with her. I was very > excited when she showed me her laptop the first time, because I had never seen > a laptop before. > At first, Julia played a game against Little Goliath on my PC. Then I played > on her laptop. After that we connected our machines into a network, and was > playing human vs. human matches until dawn. We had a very good time. > Sometimes she couldn't carry along the laptop with her. If so, she took my PC > and played alone on it. Julia was an excellent player... >RH: ...did you break off your relationship? >PM: Yes. Julia preferred longer games, whereas I liked blitz or bullet time > controls better. Finally, Julia found a guy who had a top performance PC, > and she went off with him. >RH: Do you have a chess partner nowadays to playing with? >PM: No, I'm playing alone on my PC. Sometimes I'm watching engine vs. engine > matches to get inspiration for my own games. Recently, Grandma has installed > Arena GUI for me with the strongest engines. > I'm playing a lot against each of them. >RH: Are they really strong? >PM: Not for me. For example, of 100 games Crafty can only draw 1-2 games > against me. Shredder 9 is much better, it can score 3 of 100 (on average). >RH: Huh, your ELO rating must be very high! >PM: Where is it raining? >RH. Never mind. I was told (unofficial sources) that you had tested Hydra. > Is that true? >PM: Yes. The Hydra team asked me if I could help him to test Hydra. > They were very anxious about the match against Adams. I played 10 > games against Hydra, and I won 8 of 10. > Hydra drew 1 game, because it succeeded to build a totally closed position > in the opening, and I couldn't break through without sacrificing my queen. > And finally, it won 1 game because I gave it a queen advantage. I lost > that game on time. > After the match I gave the Hydra team some good advices on how to improve it's > playing strength. They were very thankful. >RH: My last question. Are you visiting CCC now and then? >PM: No, but I've heard of the Carpathian Cricket Club many nice things already. > Please give my kind regards to the members! > I promise to visit them if I get to Denmark. Can you post some of the Hydra games. ;) Roger
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