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Subject: Re: Fruit 2.2's strength

Author: Roger D Davis

Date: 10:42:46 10/25/05

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On October 25, 2005 at 12:56:43, Dann Corbit wrote:

>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.

In your opinion, what makes his search innovative? What does he do that no one
else does?

Roger



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