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Subject: Re: Zappa Report

Author: A. Steen

Date: 09:16:10 12/30/05

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On December 30, 2005 at 12:03:57, Zappa wrote:

>Well, its been a while since I had to write a tournament report congratulating
>someone else.  I hope this doesn't become a habit :)  Anyway, congrats to Vasik!
> Rybka simply played the best chess of the tournament and deserved to win.  As I
>have said before, I am a big fan of Rybka, because whatever he is doing, its
>fundamentally different than the history-pruning-mobility-based-fruitish engines
>that everyone else seems to write (even Zappa is fundamentally a mobility based
>engine).
>
>To be honest, I was not real optimistic going into the tournament.  I have
>changed a lot of things in the latest Zappa versions, and I feel that I haven't
>managed to bugfix and tune all of them properly (example: the game against
>Ikarus).  I feel most of the knowledge is correct, but its just a matter of
>getting the values right.  People have wondered for months now why Fruit is so
>strong.  My opinion is that he simply has so few parameters to tune that he can
>get them exactly right :)  My main hope for the tournament was that the
>supercomputer would save a few points for me, but that turned out to be a comedy
>of errors.
>
>I forked the code to work on it, and when I went to merge it in I apparently
>screwed something up bigtime - I still don't know what.  At odd points it would
>simply search 150KN/s for about 20 seconds rather than 20MLN :)  I didn't even
>realize this until round 4, when Erdo switched off the supercomputer to the quad
>after about 5 moves as it was searching about 500 KN/s on average.  I'm not sure
>this was legal, but considering the result I doubt Vasik will complain :)  And
>for some reason it didn't run at all vs Spike, and after staying up until 3:00
>AM for 4 nights in a row I was just too disgusted to fix it.  Really the only
>important game for which the supercomputer was working properly was vs Shredder,
>when I just used the version I had forked before.  Sorry Sandro.
>
>To compound Zappa's errors, Erdo's superman cape fell off a bit this tournament.
> Anyway, I would rather have everything go wrong all at once, and get it over
>with.  Time to go play basketball :)
>
>cheers,
>
>anthony


Excellent and candid, and I'm not forking about either.  :-)



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