Author: Ratko V Tomic
Date: 15:50:31 09/28/99
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On September 28, 1999 at 15:29:39, Jeremy McComas wrote: >I just ordered Hiarcs 7.32 and I was wondering what people think of this >program. I kinda got scared when people started saying that hiarcs was making >bizzare moves. It is probably the best of the bunch, anyway (and I have played most of them, only Rebel 10b is close in understanding of positions). Last weekend I got up and decided to play a few fast games against Fritz 5.32, and after being outplayed from start to end in three games, I went to breakfest thinking how Fritz isn't that bad positionally. I wondered how could it have improved so drastically through its book learning. Well, when I came back to play some more I noticed it was a Fritz program, but playing Hiarcs 7.32 engine (I was testing some positions the night before and forgot to return Fritz engine to Fritz program/shortcut). Well that explained how suddenly Fritz got some positional sense. The difference in handling quiet positions, especially the blocked ones is quite noticable. That mixup showed how striking the difference is, that even being completely primed for Fritz couldn't prejudice my observation enough to override the objective difference. As to flakey aspects, I did run into some opening lines where H7.32 mishandles the opening as soon as it gets out of the book (I play its full book, not the narrow torunament one). But other programs have such lines, too (I don't know which one has the worst book). If you set-up the learning they won't lose twice in the same line. In few games H 7.32 did pick a greedy or speculative line of play and then lost, where it had a better position and could have won with a less ambitious play. While the other programs have similar judgment problem, with H 7.32 I couldn't reproduce its critical (bad) moves later. It may have to do with its aggressive re-use of hash tables accros moves, so that no two runs are identical since each move is affected by the exact timing (and thus the content of the hash tables) of earlier moves. It could be a bug, too. But whatever it is, it is so infrequent, you can't count on winning a game on it. While this random streak is a borderline flaw, it is minor compared to the outright positional blunders by, say, Fritz. With Hiarcs you can sense planning, strategy, as well as its attempt to twart your plans, to nip them in the bud, well before you're threatening anything; these abilities are completely or mostly absent with other programs (with partial exceptions for Rebel 10b). One thing I noticed with H7.32 is something I didn't see with other programs present or past: in some number of games (perhaps a quarter), somewhere well into the game, with material still equal, I realize in amazement that my position is squeezed of any possibility of counter-play, with almost all pieces still on the board there is nothing remotely hopeful I could try, and I wonder how did it manage to tie me up so completely. It reminded me of a sense of complete helplesness I had in some friendly games back in college days with a neighbour who was an IM at the time and a youth champion of Yugoslavia (Branko Damjanovic, he became later a GM and is now one of the strongest players in Yugoslavia; I later got rating around 2100 in few months of competitive play, when I was graduate student of theoretical physics at Brown over ten years ago, but had to drop competitive chess [probably before my rating reached its plateau] due to the time demands of my thesis work). So if you enjoy in being thoroughly trashed, tactically and positionally at the same time, you didn't go wrong in picking Hiarcs 7.32.
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