Author: Djordje Vidanovic
Date: 07:20:42 12/28/99
I got Deep Junior 6 several days ago and decided to find out more about it by staging a tournament with my currently strongest engines under the Deep Junior GUI. I decided on a round robin with programs playing 4 games against each other. Time controls were G/25 (game in 25 minutes, sudden death), which is the level most commonly used in rapid chess and the one quite likely to be used by computer chess fans when playing their programs. The roster included two SMP programs -- Deep Junior and Crafty 16.15, and two other super strong programs, Fritz (test version 6.66) and Hiarcs 7.32. The venue was my dualboard PII/400 machine. Each program used 32MB hash, and the Nimzo 7.32 opening book. Pondering and learning were off. Fritz 6.66 played enterprising and, at times, daring chess. In my previous testing, this particular test version that I dubbed Fritz El Diablo had shown to be very successful, often leaving its opponents far behind, and achieving incredible winning margins. I believe that ChessBase should release this new version as soon as possible, thus contending for No. 1 in SSDF. One can get a better idea about Fritz 6.66's strength by noting that in this short 12-rounder Hiarcs 7.32, the super strong, aggressive and positionally sound program by Mark Uniacke, trailed Fritz by 3.5 points. Close behind was Deep Junior 6, which played good positional and tactical chess, with an excellent evaluation of middlegame positions leading to ensuing endgames. Deep Junior 6 reached up to 1 million nodes in some of the endgames, averaging 650-700K in the middlegame. It plays rational, forceful chess that can be extremely dangerous for human players. My early estimate is that Deep Junior 6 is a cut above Junior 5 in tactics, and only slightly positionally better, probably garnering quite a few Elo points over its predecessor. Crafty 16.15 is unfortunately the only SMP version of this strong program capable of running under the Junior interface. It battled its opponents with lots of perseverence, managing to squeeze out two draws from each, unfortunately scoring no win. Some of the games it should have won, but the commercials are obviously stronger and managed to trick Crafty into drawing the games. Fritz lost only one game: to Deep Junior, and Junior lost two, only to Fritz. This fact alone indicates that the spread between Fritz 6.66 and Deep Junior on one hand and other strong programs on the other is tangible. The cross-table: 1 2 3 4 1 Fritz 6 Test 66 **** 10½1 ½11½ 11½½ 8.5/12 2 Deep Junior 6.0 01½0 **** 1½½1 1½½1 7.5/12 3 Hiarcs 7.32 ½00½ 0½½0 **** ½11½ 5.0/12 4 Crafty 16.15 P4 00½½ 0½½0 ½00½ **** 3.0/12 *** Djordje
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