Author: Ratko V Tomic
Date: 10:19:29 09/22/99
Go up one level in this thread
There does seem to be a flaky or random aspect to H732. As you noticed, it takes queenside castle more often than one sees in other programs or GM games. It also makes occasionally adventuresome moves which are hard, if not impossible to reproduce later. I had H732 only for a month (and had H6 for couple years), but had decided to reinstall it few times and turn off any learning (after winning few games following some flaky dubious idea H732 tried and which was impossible to reproduce in replays). I suspect this flakeness is due to either the learning or permanent hash tables which perhaps don't get cleared (or initialized) consistently. It may be also that there is an intentional randmizer in the program, which benefits it most of the time, but occasionally causes a flaky move to be made. Since I am using it on 2 Pentium machines (one is 266 Mhz PII/MMX, the other 400 Mhz PII-Celeron, both with 128Mb RAM, 64Mb set for hash tables, one Win95 another Win98), I doubt it is a machine or system software problem. But I have seen Fritz 5.32 do some flaky things as well, such as repeatedly playing and losing in one opening line (until I turned off the book learning and reloaded its book from the CD). Overall, though, I still find H732 most fun to play against (out of the CB engines; Rebel 10 is also fun to play against). Yes, it loses ocasionally due to some stupid irreproducable adventure it picks, but other programs make more positional blunders, especially in closed positions where e.g. Fritz 5.32 is at a complete loss what to do. I have also seen H732 avoid some greedy mistakes of Fritz (which goes after pawns while the attack is about to open up on its king side). Hiarcs somehow sees that pursuing a pawn would be bad, for no specific (tactical) reason within its search horizon. Only 20+ plies later, Fritz agrees that it has a problem. Even though my rating was only around 2100 USCF (when I played in competitions briefly as a graduate student, over a decade ago at Brown University), I find it with the current top programs that in most games I build a positional advantage for a while and then lose on a "cheap" tactical shot (which normally I should be able to see, but that would require consistent level of alertness over many moves and many games). Programs are like some disfigured athletes with hypertrophied tactical muscle and childlike strategic muscle. If they get you with their "strong arm" they win, otherwise your game looks better. Quite a difference from playing against a strong human master (e.g. my younger brother) or a grandmaster (I played occasionally GMs in friendly games; also in college had a neighbour [Damjanovic] who was an IM at the time and a youth champion of Yugoslavia and he, my brother, my sister and I had spent untold hours playing blitz, often till 3AM), where you're outplayed decisively in every aspect of the game and you can see clearly that you have no chance at all. Among the programs, Hiarcs (6 & &7) and Rebel (8-10b) are the closest to this humanlike balance, although they're still far from the real human player with similar formal rating.
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.