Author: Ratko V Tomic
Date: 20:05:50 10/08/99
Over the last couple days I downloaded and installed two versions of updates
for Chessbase programs (2xHiarcs 7.32, 1xFritz 5.32 and 1xJunior 5). Well,
I am ready now to uninstall the whole "improved" thing and reinstall the
old and "unimproved" stuff.
Here are the "improvements" I noticed in about day and half after
the installation:
1. The new search "feature" (bug?) while still in the book
dumps the search info into the window where it used to show
the opening move options. So, you can't look any more
at the standard opening moves as you play. (Of course, you can
still "Browse tree" but that's not playing a chess game any more
but studying the opening.) The new "feature" kicks in at around
3rd or 4th move and from there on they clobber the display of the
book moves with the analysis.
2. The program's moves were "improved" by an animated flicker of the
piece the program moves. This improvement can't be turned off.
Maybe they had five year olds beta testing (if they do that any
more), since only they could possibly like that kind of amusement
(to break the boredoom of having to play chess, I guess).
3. The analysis window gets erased between moves with a different
color than the background, for a fraction of a second, then it
gets erased again with the normal background color. That makes the
whole window flash as if a lightening is firing behind it. Again, my
five year old may get amused by that kind of "special" effects. Anyone
older risks epilepsy while playing fast games.
4. Tried some bad lines in Hiarcs (which it loses right after it gets
out of the book), they're still in the "improved" book. So much for
"Weed the tree" procedure.
5. The "learning" feature is as dumb as ever. If you turn it on,
it quickly ends up playing the same opening line over and over,
while if it had lost some game, it drops the whole big chunk of
the opening where that line occurred, even though it lost for some
other reason much later in the game.
If you turn the "learning" off (and also set file attributes on
the opening books to read-only, since it doesn't seem to respect
the mere configuration setting to "no learning", I guess it helps
them cheat on mechanized tests which turn the learning off; I am
thankful, though, they don't require [as yet] the hard disk to be
disconnected during the opening to disable the "learning" for real)
-- well then every time it comes out of the book you have to wait
however many minutes it takes it to discover from scratch the same
move it discovered the last time you played that line.
Is just remembering the moves played (at given level) without
skewing the variety of opening play too complex to program? It
seems by bundling together the remembering of the line played
along with skewing the opening choices, they've tuned themselves
to perform for the SSDF's mechanized testing (so they can appear
stronger by winning the identical game ten times in a row, I guess),
as for customer's convenience and time, who cares, let them buy
faster machine if they don't enjoy waiting.
Why can't they just remember the result of calculation from the last
time (so they don't waste my time, thinking the same thing over and
over with the same result over and over) without reducing the
opening variety. In case they lose, they need to back off one or two
moves (at most) from the point their score went negative, but not
drop the whole Sicilian after they lose couple games in Sicilian
due to the program's misjudgment 10-15 moves after the book ended.
Now, for fairness, all programs, if they have learning, it's geared
to give them an edge in a mindless kind of automated machine-machine
play, while at the same time forcing their customers to either waste
time on repeated calculations or to play the same opening line over
and over. So this is not just a CB problem. I wish some of the folks
who write these programs would try it out occasionally as a user,
and see if they enjoy either of the two choices above. If they wish
to get an edge through such "inspired" means, it would be enough to
have an option for "mindless machine-machine" play and do this kind
of so-called "learning" in that mode only. Customers are not computers
who don't mind playing the same line over and over and who don't mind
waiting for the other computer to calculate the same thing over
and over.
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