Author: Heiko Mikala
Date: 17:48:36 11/14/99
Hi everybody!
During the last weeks I have played a big tournament, g/60 on two computers,
including some of the brand-new and some of the strongest programs available.
I would like to show you the result, and tell you about my impressions.
The following programs played in this tournament:
-------------------------------------------------
Fritz 6
Rebel Century
Nimzo 7.32
Chessmaster 6000
MChess Pro 8
Genius 5 (Mephisto Genius 98, using version 5.001 of the engine)
The conditions were:
--------------------
Game in 60 minutes (60 minutes for each of the programs)
2 computers: IBM 6x86MX PR-300, 64/128 MB Ram (approx. as fast as PII-300)
Pondering enabled
Each program used it's own opening book, strongest settings, learning
enabled where possible, EGTB's where possible (3,4 and a few 5-men)
And this is the resulting crosstable:
-------------------------------------
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
1 Fritz 6 ** 1½ ½1 ½½ ½0 ½1 11 8.0/12
2 Nimzo 7.32 0½ ** 0½ ½½ 1½ 11 11 7.5/12
3 MChess Pro 8 ½0 1½ ** 01 01 10 1½ 6.5/12
4 Hiarcs 7.32 ½½ ½½ 10 ** 10 10 01 6.0/12
5 CM6000 ½1 0½ 10 01 ** ½0 ½½ 5.5/12
6 Genius 5 ½0 00 01 01 ½1 ** ½1 5.5/12
7 Rebel Century 00 00 0½ 10 ½½ ½0 ** 3.0/12
You can find the PGN of all the games at:
http://www.online-club.de/~rp45195/tournaments
I would like to point out, that I played this tournament to find out more
about the playing-styles of the new programs, not to find out which one
is the strongest or which one would win the tournament.
So, to make this very clear, I'm not saying that the winner is the strongest
program and the last one is the weakest.
I originally started to play Fritz 6 against some of the strongest opponents
I had available, two games each (1 white, 1 black) to find out more about
the new Fritz. I then ordered Rebel Century and thought it would be interesting
to play Century against the same opponents to find out more about Century and to
be able to compare the results. After these games had been finished, I thought
it would be interesting to make this a complete tournament, especially since
I wanted to see my personal favourite program (MChess Pro) to play some more
games.
During the time I played the rest of the games to make this a complete tourna-
ment, I heard of some extremely impressive results of Nimzo 7.32 (you can find
some of them at the Gambit Soft forum, tournament games played on two comps),
so I decided to order Nimzo 7.32 (yes, I'm crazy! ;-) and enter it into this
tournament too (crazy might be the wrong word, stupid may be better :)
The games have been played using the Autoplayer wherever possible, with some
exceptions. All games including Chessmaster and Genius 5 have been played by
hand, the games between Rebel and MChess have been played by hand too. No matter
which method had been used, I have watched all games live, since the reason
for these games was to find out more about the playing style of the programs.
I didn't see any anomalies in the games that were played using Auto232, and I'ld
like to point out especially, that the games with Rebel involved went absolutely
fine. Rebels nodes/second rate has always been normal (around 100k np/s on my
computers).
My impressions of the programs and the games:
Fritz 6:
--------
Well, this is one of the strongest programs available, no doubt about it. I've
heard some rumours about F6 not being stronger than F5.32, but I don't think so.
At least it won this tournament, it lost only 1 game out of 12 against this
extremely strong opposition, and it's also leading my private blitz rating-list,
which consists of 2500 games (g/5) in front of Hiarcs 7.32, Fritz 3.1 (!) and
Fritz 5.32.
My impression of F6 is, that it is one of the strongest programs tactically (we
all knew this already, eh?) but that it could be a bit more aggressive. Not that
it's a sheep, it's aggressive already, but maybe it should be even more
aggressive.
It seems to use it's tactical superiority mainly to prevent to fall into traps,
and
to defend all attacks, biting as soon as the opponent makes a mistake. But
this way it plays a lot of draws, and imagine what could happen, if F6 would
aggressively attack all the time!?
Nimzo 7.32:
-----------
This is an extremely interesting program, and I'm happy that I finally bought
it. It's extremely strong, and it could well have won this tournament if it
would
not have played a bad opening line in the first game against F6 (the games
Nimzo-Fritz were the last games I played). Just to comment on the book, with the
exception of this one game I had the impression that Nimzo's opening book is
extraordinarily good.
Nimzo seems to be an extremely aggressive program, although in a different sense
than for example MChess. While MChess always tries to attack the enemies king,
Nimzo tries to attack where it sees the best chances. I have seen two games,
where
Nimzo agressively pushed forward it's pawns on one side of the board, when the
opponent didn't expect anything like that to happen. My impression is, that
Nimzo
has some knowledge to help it make plans in certain situations. On the other
hand,
there are situations, where Nimzo seems unable to build a plan, but then it
simply
plays in a style like all the other top programs, which isn't bad at all ;-)
MChess Pro 8:
-------------
Well, if MChess had not been my favourite program already, it would have become
so definitely after this tournament! Some of the most interesting, most
thrilling
games of this tournament have been played when MChess was involved.
This program is simply unbelievable and it's style is so different than all the
others. MChess is by far the most agressive program I've ever seen, it always
tries to attack the opposing king, when possible. The most interesting thing
about
this is, that it often makes you believe, that long-range planning is involved.
It doesn't attack with only one or two pieces, resulting in short fights without
much being won, like some other programs do. Instead it slowly develops it's
pieces, building up an attack for some moves and then suddenly launches the
strike.
These attacks are often decisive for the outcome of the game, although, of
course,
sometimes the attacks fail too (but much more often they are succesful).
Another interesting thing about MChess is, that it's evaluation very often
indicates
the outcome of the game much earlier (often many, many moves) than the
evaluations
of the opponents. And it's always fascinating to watch it's mainlines.
MChess must have a fantastic evaluation function, and I'm sure it uses some
search extensions, which no one else uses. It's extremely slow compared to
others,
but still seems to be one of the best tactical programs around.
It plays an extremely strong endgame too.
Unfortunately I have the feeling, that there is a small but severe bug in
MChess's
search function, because I have seen in two games, in which MChess was leading
or at least equal, that it had a good PV-move with a good evaluation for a
long time, then suddenly switched to another move, showing a worse evaluation
than
before, immediately played this move, and directly after playing this move
discovered (while pondering) that this move was much worse than the move it had
thought about before. This should of course normally be impossible. If there is
a best move on a certain depth already, it should never switch to and play an
inferior move, if it sees that this move is worse...
If you want to see some of MChess best games, please have a look at the first
game against Rebel, the two games against Hiarcs (these were thrillers!) or
at the first game against Nimzo, although in the game against Nimzo, MChess
didn't play a king-attack, but you can see it's agressivenes very good here.
Hiarcs 7.32:
------------
A very strong program too, but I still can not decide about it's playing style.
Sometimes it plays brilliant attacks, in other games it doesn't seem to be able
to find a plan at all. What makes me wonder is, that it sometimes plays
brilliant
king-attacks, but also seems to have a big weakness in it's own king-safety. You
can see this weakness very good in Hiarcs games against MChess. Nevertheless,
Hiarcs has become one of my favourites, because boring games with Hiarcs
involved
are very rare.
Tactically Hiarcs is extremely strong, which could make you wonder, considering
it's low nps rate. Must be using some great extensions, and some great selective
techniques too, because it often reaches deep search depths despite of it's low
nps-rate.
Chessmaster 6000
----------------
A very solid program. Doesn't seem to have any extraordinary strenghts or weak-
nesses. It simply plays rock-solid chess. I have heard some people speak about
Chessmaster beeing an agressive program, sacrificing pieces sometimes to win a
game, but I couldn't witness such things in all the games I have played so far.
To all you CM-freaks, planning to lynch me now, let me tell you, that I've been
a collector of CM-versions for a long time, and really like the King engine.
But if you really want to see an agressive, attacking program, perhaps you
should have a look at CStal or MChess, maybe even Nimzo. Still, Chessmaster is
a great program, I enjoy to see it play.
Genius 5:
---------
The legend. Still one of the strongest, most impressive programs out there. I
don't understand all the rumours about Genius beeing much weaker than the other
top programs, it simply isn't. For example, look at the crosstable of the tour-
nament, before Nimzo 7.32 entered the stage:
1 2 3 4 5 6
1 Fritz 6 ** ½1 ½0 ½½ ½1 11 6.5/10
2 Genius 5 ½0 ** ½1 01 01 ½1 5.5/10
3 CM6000 ½1 ½0 ** 01 10 ½½ 5.0/10
4 Hiarcs 7.32 ½½ 10 10 ** 10 01 5.0/10
5 MChess Pro 8 ½0 10 01 01 ** 1½ 5.0/10
6 Rebel Century 00 ½0 ½½ 10 0½ ** 3.0/10
Genius was in second place here. Unfortunately it lost both games against Nimzo
badly, and my impression is, that it has huge problems against the very good,
very fast Nullmovers, like Fritz and Nimzo. But it still is one of the best
defenders around, and it definitely still plays one of the best endgames of all
programs available, although it doesn't use EGTB's.
If you like Genius style of play is another question, though. I, personaly,
think
that it plays much too defensive, and so I often find Genius's games against
other
computers a bit boring. But if it manages to reach the endgame, you'll see some
great chess! And I still can't let my hands of it. It's a legend, it will always
be a legend and legends tend to be fascinating ;-)
Rebel Century:
--------------
I don't understand what happened to Rebel. Rebel 8 has been one of my favourite
programs for a very long time, because it played the most solid chess I had ever
seen in a chess program. It *never* made a bad mistake and it's opponents had to
play extraordinarily good to beat Rebel. I had expected Rebel Century to finish
in one of the first places in this tournament, but well, it didn't. I had
published all the games of F6 and Century on the german Gambit-Soft forum some
weeks ago, with some comments, and then asked others to help me with Century, to
find out about some potential problems in my installation. I even asked them to
check the moves, but I didn't get a response from anyone being unable to repro-
duce the moves. I'm sure I used the strongest settings, I did reload the Rebel
personality, set Rebel to strongest settings, even did let it play in pure
MS-Dos
mode, which is said to be a few percent faster for Rebel, than a dos-window in
Win9x.
Well, after all, these have only been 12 games, and there has been a positive
trend in the games against Chessmaster and Hiarcs. The last two games against
Nimzo on the other hand have been bad losses again. But then again, Rebel has
always had big problems against fast Nullmovers like Fritz and Nimzo.
To make the impression of Rebel not too bad, there have been some very positive
results of Rebel Century, posted on the german CSS and Gambit-Soft forums by
some
other testers. So maybe Century was simply unlucky in my tournament. I really,
really hope so, because I like Rebel.
Finally:
--------
I already have ordered the new HCC/Millennium package, which includes Shredder 4
and Genius 6.5 (crazy? stupid?? You name it! ;-), and if I find the time and
the energy, I would really like to enter these two programs in my tournament.
Other possibilities would be CSTal II or Crafty 17.x, but I would like to enter
the very new programs first, and in case of Crafty, I would have to play all the
games by hand...
I'd also like to see, how Tiger would do in this tournament, but it seems we
will
have to wait some more time, before Tiger is available.
Ok, enough for today, I hope you enjoy the games (remember, you can download
them
at the address mentioned above),
greetings,
Heiko.
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