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Subject: Re: Zappa-Isichess

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 13:00:04 08/21/05

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On August 21, 2005 at 10:08:27, Peter Berger wrote:

>On August 20, 2005 at 18:40:12, Arturo Ochoa wrote:
>
>>Well, I dont know. I said when Zappa began to prepare but nothing has been said
>>about Crafty. So, there is no refutation.
>
>Well, there was *no* preparation for this tournament at all :) . Crafty played
>with the same book as last year in Ramat-Gan.
>
>I simply took the time to avoid a few known problems. Total amount of time used
>on book preparation and tests was about 8 hours I think.
>
>As Crafty's book again did reasonably well, this is further evidence that book
>cooking is overrated IMHO.
>
>Peter

I agree.  The idea is just to get a non-lost position and let the program(s)
have a chance.  The last round was a good example.  Perfectly acceptable book
position, better than acceptable in fact.  Crafty just played poorly at one
point where it got tangled up with that rather ridiculous Na1 move.  It might be
the only move for all I know, but if it is, it is still ugly...  I think white
could have won the pawn on b3 if it sat about that quickly, because we had one
more piece to attack it.  But with the knight at a1, we had to keep a rook on
the first rank to defend the knight, and there was no way to get to it.  But
move that knight to d2 or whatever, and now all of white's pieces can attack it,
while black is a piece shy thanks to the wrong-colored bishop.

But it just played poorly thru that part of the game, and probably could have
lost the game had black played some of the moves it was predicting (saw the
score as low as almost -2.0 at one point).

It's now time to fix the evaluation problems.  And stop some of the nonsensical
things we saw.  That's next on the list, since I believe we are set with respect
to using any reasonable parallel architecture we might get access to for next
year...  With luck, we might possibly see 4-core chips next year, and maybe find
an 8-way at least, or a 16-way box, to go along with that.

More later...



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