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Subject: Re: Fruit 2.2's strength

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 09:56:43 10/25/05

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On October 25, 2005 at 12:28:07, Lar Mader wrote:

>I realize that this is a difficult question...
>
>I'm curious about what makes Fruit 2.2 so strong.  Also, it is impressive how
>quickly Fabien achieved this strength.  Fritz 9 and Shredder 9 seem to be close
>to Fruit 2.2 in strength, and yet they have been in development for a much
>longer time with a lot more resources.  Has anyone spent any time examining the
>2.1 source code, or have any other insights into what this program does that
>makes it so effective?

Fabien does everything well.  He is a magnificent and careful programmer.  He
obviously puts a lot of effort into making things correct.  He has a lot of
insight to pick out what is important and concentrate on that.

His search is excellent and innovative.  He does some things that nobody else
does.  I'm not really sure how he is able to not hash the PV and still have a
stupendously fast search, but that is pretty amazing.

His evaluation function is also very different from other evaluation functions.
He pays a lot of attention to control of the board.

But it's kind of like asking "What makes Einstein so smart?" or "What makes
Michael Johnson so fast?"  When you are talking about the best in the world at
anything, you are talking about a peculiar kind of genius or at least something
several standard deviations away from the norm.  It takes a pretty smart person
to write any sort of a chess program.  To make a world champion program in a
short time frame takes a sort of freakish excellence that you see only on very
rare occasions.

IMO-YMMV.



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