Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 11:03:30 02/17/05
A couple of days ago, a well-known programmer and regular poster here on the CCC claimed that a good opening book was worth at least 700 Elo points. I thought this number looked completely outrageous, and decided to do a simple experiment. I am the author of a basic and minimalistic UCI chess engine called Glaurung. Source code and executables for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows can be found at the following URL: http://www.math.uio.no/~romstad/glaurung/glaurung.html Recently, I have played some test matches with Glaurung against the strongest engine I have on my compter: Hiarcs 9.6. Not surprisingly, all such matches end in crushing victories for Hiarcs. The last match I played ended 75-25 in Hiarcs' favor. As a crude test of the "good book=700 Elo" claim, I have now repeated the match with identical program versions and conditions, except that Hiarcs was now playing without an opening book. Assuming that Hiarcs' book is worth 700 Elo, the expected result of this second match would be something like 95-5 in _Glaurung's_ favor. The actual result of the second match was very close to the first match: Hiarcs won by 72-28. As far as I can see, this means that at least one of the following must be true: a) The statement "good book=700 Elo" is lightyears away from the truth. b) Hiarcs has an extremely bad opening book, and with a half decent opening book it would be several hundred rating points ahead of Shredder. Tord
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