Author: Ratko V Tomic
Date: 10:55:46 10/09/99
Go up one level in this thread
That seems to be dependent on how frequent given opening line was in its book. If it was rare with, say, just a handful of wins for one side, even a handful of games makes the significant change. In my case, after it locked into the same line (nimzowitsch opening), the book showed 100% vs 0% for one side, and no matter how you scale that it still remains 100% vs 0%, i.e. the most successful line. At that point I had an option to check the literature and find a good counter and then win enough games in that line to offset the nonscalable ratio or reinstall the book from scratch. Reinstalling seemed quicker, so I did that, and set the learning influence to minimal, variety to maximal, but few days later again it locked into the single line (again nimzo). So at that point I reinstalled the book again and turned off the learning. But a day later when it started again playing nimzo several times in a row, I finally reinstalled the book and turned the file attributes to read only, and that finally made the variety of openings Ok. Another problem with "learning" was that at some point it threw away entire Sicilian from its repertoire after losing couple games for reasons well beyond the opening. I am not sure why, their bugs and poorly thought out design choices are sometimes hard to distinguish (they did have a good artist, their stuff is visually the best of the bunch). Of course, now, with learning completely disabled, I have to wait every time it comes out of the book to calculate the same thing it did perhaps yesterday, but of the two flaws, this one seemed the lesser irritation (since I could click "move now" and have it play the same thing I remembered from the last time without waiting. This whole "learning" feature is obviously a cheap gimmick designed to let it lock in right away into the "killer line" and win ten times in a row an identical game against another computer (which might not have "learning") in an unchecked (by common sense) auto-play. I was hoping the new service pack, with its think ahead at the end of opening lines, would somewhat reduce the waiting. Unfortunately, it is obvious that nobody there tried it out in a few normal games after programmers implemented it. The flashing of the pieces (as program makes a move) and of the analysis window is quite annoying, and overwriting of the opening move list with the look-ahead analysis (since some lines end sooner than others, this usually kicks in 3-4 moves into the game) is clearly a design flaw. The three problems were enough for me to uninstall the "improved" version and reinstall the old one (on all three programs). Now that reinstalling is a hassle, too, given that they insist on loading your hard disk with tens of megabytes of various language files, even though I tell it "English" as the main and the secondary language option. For some reason they insist on loading the whole EU linguistic spectrum. I suppose if an Italian tourist arrives here to Lexington, MA, USA, and by some chance happens to somehow strike a conversation with me, and then I take him to my home and after dinner, to my computer and show him Hiarcs 7.32, and he happens to peek at the Chessbase directories and finds no CHATT\ITALIANO voice files, his feelings might get hurt. No, that can't be allowed. So, with these kinds of scenarios in mind, I suppose, the political correctness department of CB decided that everyone has to sacrifice tens of megabytes of hard disk to all the languages they got on the CD, so nobody's feelings are in danger of being hurt when they travel... Anyway, since the political correctness ladies over there at CB figured (rightly) that some insensitive male jerk in USA might try to delete manually ITALIANO, SLOVENIAN, etc, they put a trap in that plan by keeping some of the key files only in DEUTSCHE directories (such as tool/button bitmaps). Now if the insensitive jerk, who cares more about his free hard disk megabytes than about potentially hurt feelings of another fellow human, goes on and deletes other language directories, the control buttons on the menu (such as Board button) vanish. So if you're one of those insensitive males, before deleting other language directories, check which files are present only in deutsche directories and copy them into your langauge directory, before deleting the rest.
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