Author: James T. Walker
Date: 20:18:43 05/07/99
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On May 07, 1999 at 20:16:19, Richard Heldmann wrote: >Any comments on CSTAL2? Is it a 'strong' program? Will it be on the next SSDF >list? > >Rick Heldmann Hello Rick, As other post have noted it will not show up on the SSDF list. I have CSTal-2 running on a PII 333. I've been running it on ICC for about 3 weeks now. I limited the games to Blitz and against humans only untill yesterday. I wanted to see how well it plays against humans vs how well it plays against computers. I think it's blitz rating topped out around 2650 against humans. It plays a very interesting game and on occasion will try some speculative moves which may or may not work out. It searches about 7 Knps on my PII 333. I think it is fun to play but the "Level" control is not refined yet and on the lowest level I found it played over 2150 on ICC. This was against 25 players rated from 1800 to 2300. Maybe some of the players were psyched out because of the 2600+ rating it was carrying at the time. Some players resigned early and I did not count their games in the 25 I manually rated. At level 1 (It's lowest level) it searches about 200nps. That's not a misprint! Yes it searches 200 nps and plays about 2100 chess on the lowest level. This may yet be refined as it also would go on an "extension safari" and not get back in time to finish the game. This happened 6 times in 35 games (25 on Lv 1 and 10 on Lv10). In spite of that it also played around 2300 on level 10 of the 50 levels (Level 50 is the strongest). This was all at blitz against humans. I don't think these ratings will hold up against computers. I could not get many humans to play at standard time controls on ICC. Anyway I don't trust standard time controls on ICC as it is too easy to cheat. It's harder to cheat at blitz but even this can be done. I know of one account that plays blitz by manually entering the moves and plays 2500 plus with Genius5. This is a legitimate computer account but proves it can be done. There are several CSTal-2 accounts on ICC now and they are pretty easy to find and play against to find out for yourself how they play. Try one in an unrated game if you want. Since most of us are rated much less than 2650 it's obviously enough challenge for the majority. It's fun to play. If you have two computers it will play auto232 and the 2nd computer can run a program like Fritz on the ICC with CSTal-2 acting as the "Relay" between the 2nd computer and ICC opponents. This is not a perfectly smooth operation but can be managed. The interface is not as good as Blitzen but it's very good for running a program on ICC. If you want the strongest program then get Fritz or Hiarcs or CM6K but if you want to add something "different" to your collection I can recommend it. I don't know how good it would be at overnight searching for correspondence games because I never tried it. It comes with 3/4 man tablebases and a large "User" book plus a gambit book. I don't think you can add your own book moves-not sure. It will import and export single PGN games. That's about all I know about it after 3 weeks. Jim Walker
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