Author: Marc Lacrosse
Date: 15:19:49 08/22/05
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Dear Ed, As you certainly understood in my last post : - I did not intend in any way to lower zappa's victory : i still think my former posts (the older ones, before any polemics, long before the end of wcc) were very clear : long before the tournament was finished (and after we had been cruely beaten by zappa in one of the very first rounds) I truly thought and publicly said zappa's play was outstanding. - The only point on which I wished to react to your initial post - and my poor english was probably not correct - is on a precise point : your entire post was globally praising (after years of commercial progs domination) the advent of new amateur top-level programs able to contest the former hierarchy. Both in the title and in the core of your post you only cited Zappa. OK zappa was a clear winner. But I just wished to stress that in my opinion I felt that the "amateur", opensource, totally accessible (and thus radically different from the former commercial domination) aspects of the new situation were intrinsically more patent in the case of fruit than in the one of zappa even though zappa had clearly won their first public competitive appearance. - you now say "Fruit is a sensation". You are right in that for sure it did not yet pass the test of time. But I would say "Zappa is even more a sensation" After good competitive results ten months ago, the public version of zappa (1.0) was a big disappointment for all (and was in not a single test able to enter the top ten). Now we have a completely secret MP version of zappa without any evidence that a public one will be offered for testing. At the opposite Fruit 2.1 published two months ago has been tested in thousands of both slow and blitz games with outstanding achievements (equal second with Fritz slightly above Junior a few dozens elo points behind shredder). I can tell you FruitX (the one which competed in Iceland) will soon be published with full code and optimized parameters. In our private tests it is the best program in the world on ordinary PC with neutral hardware (not far ahead of shredder or toga). Are you sure that an eventual zappa 2.0a on monoprocessor will have the same results on fairly equal hardware, the kind of hardware anybody could have at home ? Are you even sure that you will have any opportunity to test zappa's intrinsical strength? In any case we will be glad to have such a large-scale comparison performed with _any_ chess software. - Finally I completely agree with you : "Bottom line: CC is still exciting, lots of progress is looming, a new and challenging era has started, Fabien and Anthony having given the starting shot." I could not say it better, Ed With truly friendly regards Marc
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