Author: Zappa
Date: 09:03:57 12/30/05
Well, its been a while since I had to write a tournament report congratulating someone else. I hope this doesn't become a habit :) Anyway, congrats to Vasik! Rybka simply played the best chess of the tournament and deserved to win. As I have said before, I am a big fan of Rybka, because whatever he is doing, its fundamentally different than the history-pruning-mobility-based-fruitish engines that everyone else seems to write (even Zappa is fundamentally a mobility based engine). To be honest, I was not real optimistic going into the tournament. I have changed a lot of things in the latest Zappa versions, and I feel that I haven't managed to bugfix and tune all of them properly (example: the game against Ikarus). I feel most of the knowledge is correct, but its just a matter of getting the values right. People have wondered for months now why Fruit is so strong. My opinion is that he simply has so few parameters to tune that he can get them exactly right :) My main hope for the tournament was that the supercomputer would save a few points for me, but that turned out to be a comedy of errors. I forked the code to work on it, and when I went to merge it in I apparently screwed something up bigtime - I still don't know what. At odd points it would simply search 150KN/s for about 20 seconds rather than 20MLN :) I didn't even realize this until round 4, when Erdo switched off the supercomputer to the quad after about 5 moves as it was searching about 500 KN/s on average. I'm not sure this was legal, but considering the result I doubt Vasik will complain :) And for some reason it didn't run at all vs Spike, and after staying up until 3:00 AM for 4 nights in a row I was just too disgusted to fix it. Really the only important game for which the supercomputer was working properly was vs Shredder, when I just used the version I had forked before. Sorry Sandro. To compound Zappa's errors, Erdo's superman cape fell off a bit this tournament. Anyway, I would rather have everything go wrong all at once, and get it over with. Time to go play basketball :) cheers, anthony
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