Author: will smtih
Date: 21:12:10 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. What's your opinion of CM6000? does it play like a human?
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.