Author: Heiko Mikala
Date: 15:36:30 01/18/00
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On January 17, 2000 at 12:57:26, James A. Tackett wrote: > As a long time purchaser of many chess programs, I am most interested in the >playing style of the program rather than its objective strength. I would like >to here opinions on which comercial chess program comes closest to playing like >a HUMAN master. The question of course is, how you define the difference between the playing style of a human master and a "typical" chess program. If your main criterion is long range planning, than my answer would definitely be MChess Pro. After watching hundreds or maybe thousands of games with and between chess programs, MChess Pro has become my favourite program concerning playing style. It is the only program, that makes you believe long range planning is really involved. You will very often see it slowly moving it's pieces into attack positions, transferring them to the king side, trying to control the diagonals too and then suddenly launch the attack. This becomes even more evident, if you watch it's main lines and evaluations. Watching it's main lines, you can see that it really plans to put it's pieces into good positions. Watching it's evaluations, you can see, that it not only moves it's pieces into good positions by accident, but that it understands what it does and sees the advantage of doing so. You can often see it's evaluation go higher and higher, the better it's pieces are developed, while the evaluations of it's opponents stay low. And you can see, that it doesn't give high evaluations for tactical chances only, but for positional advantages and attacking abilities. For MChess Pro, at least 1 of every 2 games is a real thriller, mostly with furious king attacks, and most of the time these thriller games are convincing wins for MChess, where the opponent didn't have a clue of what was going on, until it's too late. Of course, sometimes these attacks fail, but then you will often see nice wins by the opponents, making the games still very enjoyable. And of course not every game shows the above mentioned long range planning, because it takes two to play a game, and the opponents are strong too :) If I say that at least 1 of every 2 MChess Pro games is a thriller, than I should mention, that in my opinion this a lot compared to other programs, where only 1 out of 5 or 1 out of 10 games is really interesting. Another very interesting program in this regard is CSTal (I and II), which has been mentioned by others too. But the difference between these two is, that CSTal most often only shows it's brilliance against weaker opponents (where you will see really super-brilliant games!), but is often not able to play so brilliant against equally strong or (maybe) stronger opponents. If you'd like to see CSTal in action, you could have a look at FICS, where it played using the handle "TheComputer" IIRC. I don't know, if it's still there, this was some months ago. But there it showed, that it can play brilliant blitz games too, I've seen some very exciting and interesting games played by it there. Another interesting program (concerning playing style) seems to be Nimzo 7.32, but it's not so much the long range planning, but more the sometimes wild play that makes it's style so amusing. On the other hand, I've seen some horrible games by Nimzo 7.32 too, that didn't look like a human master at all. Still, Nimzo 7.32 plays very refreshing and is definitely one of the strongest. I'm not sure, if one can describe Nimzo's style human like, I guess in most of the games this is not the case. But some of it's games definitely are. Rebel Century plays very, very nice and interesting too, nearly always marching forward, not so much looking for tactical chances, but more for positional advantages. Still it's playing style is a lot different to that of MChess Pro and CSTal, and I consider MChess's style to be a bit more human like than Rebel's style. There are a lot of other programs, playing very exciting chess, but for different reasons. Your question was for human (master) like style, so I'll stop here, because I consider the above mentioned programs to be most human like (and I guess I've written more than anyone would read anyway ;-) Greetings, Heiko.
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