Single Comment

Derek: 'I hope you can handle constructive advice.'

It gives me a big laugh, that's for sure.

Of course none of what you say is even remotely true. That is what happens
if you jump to conclusions regarding complex matters you are not
knowledgeable about, without even taking the trouble to verify your ideas.


Of course I extensively TESTED how the playing strength of Joker80, (and
all available other engines), varied as a function of time control. This
was the purpose of several elaborate time-odds tournament I conducted,
where various versions of most engines participated that had to play their
games in 36, 12, 4, 1:30, 0:40 or 0:24 min, where handicapped engines were meeting non-handicapped ones in a full round robin. (I.e. the handicaps were factors 3, 9, 24, 54 or 90, where only the strongest engines were handicapped upto the very maximum, and the weakest only participated in an unhandicapped version). 

And of course Joker80 behaves similar to any Shannon-type engine that is reasonably free of bugs: its playing strength measured in Elo monotonically increases in a logarithmic fashion, approximately to the formula rating = 100*ln(time). So Joker80 at 5 min/move crushes Joker80 at 1 sec per move, as you could have easily found out for yourself. So that much for your nonsense about Joker80 failing to improve its move quality with time. For some discussion on one of the tournaments, see:

http://www.talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19764&postdays=0&postorder=asc&topic_view=flat&start=34

At that time Fairy-Max still had a hash-table bug that made it hang (and
subsequently forfeit on time) that was striking at a fixed rate per
second, so that Fairy-Max started to forfeit more and more games at longer
TC. Since then the bug has been identified and repaired, and now also
Fairy-Max performs progressively better at longer TC.

So nice try, but next time better save your breath for telling the surgeon
how to do his job before he will perform open heart surgery on you. Because
he has no doubt much more to learn from you regarding cardiology than I
have in the area of building Chess engines...

Things are as they are, and can become known by observation and testing.
Believing in misconceptions born out of ignorance is not really helpful.
Or, more explicitly: if you think you know how to build better Chess
engines than other people, by all means, do so. It will be fun to confront
your ideas with reality. In the mean time I will continue to build them as
I think best, (and know is best, through extensive testing), so you should have every chance to surpass them. Lacking that, you could at least _use_ the engines of others to check out if your theories of how they behave have any reality value. You don't have to depend on the time-odds tourneys and other tests I conduct. You might not even be aware of them, as the developers of Chess engines hardly ever publish the thousands of games they do for testing if their ideas work in practice.