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Subject: Re: Genius for Palm--weak??

Author: Ricardo Gibert

Date: 13:40:41 02/16/00

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On February 16, 2000 at 16:08:06, Ian Osgood wrote:

[snip]

>
>This is a common complaint against the entire Genius line of programs: at blitz
>speeds they play mostly solid positional chess, with the occasional gaffe.  The
>cause is the selective search Lang uses.  Genius only generates a handful of
>moves for itself and *all* the responses for the opponent (which is why the PV
>advances in depth by 2 each iteration).  This leads to conservative play, and
>the occasional "blind spot".

Interesting. I wonder how Lang goes about making Genius "selective". Does he do
the normal move ordering stuff and truncate the list of moves looked at or does
he do something else?

>
>I think Lang used his Roma engine unmodified because 1) it was already written
>in  68000 assembly, 2) it was designed for slow hardware, 3) it was the last of
>his dedicated programs not to use a hash table, and 4) by using the engine
>unmodified, he could claim that PalmGenius is a world champion program (which it
>was in 1987).  One should remember that Roma was sold in 1987, when *all*
>processors were slow.  The design of his search takes that into account.
>
>I have found that at faster speeds (2 sec/move) PlamGenius is competitive with a
>more modern portable unit, the Sapphire II.  His selective search gets deep
>enough quickly enough to offset the Sapphire's hash tables (not so effective at
>short depths).  This advantage seems to dissipate at longer time controls.
>Also, the opening book of the registered PalmGenius is still rather small
>compared to the Sapphire II, a shortcoming I expect to be resolved in the Pro
>version.
>
>Ian



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