Author: odell hall
Date: 10:52:13 09/22/99
Go up one level in this thread
On September 22, 1999 at 13:19:29, Ratko V Tomic wrote: >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. At Last! an intelligent post that gets to the heart of what my post was all about!! Ofcourse any critisism to the "God" hiarcs7.32 is bound to be met with disapproval, condemnation, and accusations of cheating by certain fantatical members of this group. I think what you said about the possible reasons some moves are unreproducable has alot of merit. I noticed of all the programs that I have hiarcs6, 7 are the only ones where some moves are not reproduced. Also their is a variety of reasons which account for this, for instance the different forms that hiarcs can come in, like the dos version as opposed to the fritz5 based engine. I once posted a game I played against hiarcs6 (dos) and got some similiar feedback about moves being inconsistent, ofcourse many posters were using the Fritz5.15 interface for the hiarcs6 engine. There has never been a consistensy of moves with hiarcs. Your comments about hiarcs occasional erratic play, and bizzare plans, is really what my post was all about, I was not making any claims that it was weak, only that it occasionally plays bizzare, personally I perfer the more solid and consistent Rebel, fritz, and junior5, but that's just my opinion.
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