I guess I should have bought the CD's

[The PIT]

Fritz Endgame Turbo CDs. 4 CDs for containing all the tablebases to enable perfect 5 (or fewer) piece endgames to be played by your software. For use with Fritz 6/Junior 7/Nimzo 8. Requires: Fritz 6/Junior 6/Nimzo 7.32 or higher.

Now I can generate the tablebases myself. Having a 2.2 P4 I didn't think it'd take too long. So far two days and the endgame peice ending it's creating now has been running for 24 hrs I think some of the remaining ones will be created a bit quicker hopefully.

Total disk space needed 30 gig 8 gig when compressed.

[Gurm]

Are you talking about chess, or am I totally confused?

- Gurm

[Dr Mordrid]

You're not confused....he's talking (and thinking) chess....compulsively

Dr. Mordrid

[The PIT]

Should have said chess. The last set of computation took 43hrs 51 mins. Could use it for benchmarking CPU's.

[K6-III]

Takes too long to be a useful benchmark, at least until CPU's are about 100x faster....

[The PIT]

Depends which peice ending you choose some go through very rapidly. The one it's doing now looks like another possible two dayer though.

[Tjalfe]

You must be quite the player to have the computer ponder your move for 2 days!

[The PIT]

It's just generating four peice and five peice endings. As soon as these are done I'll copy them across into the Chessbase folder. When the computer comes to the end game it will look the lines up rather than having to compute them from the beginnning.
For the record I have the computer set at an average 3 minutes per move for the game. A game normally about three hours which tends to get a split across a few evenings. Unless I'm playing UT or Golf instead.
The programme normally wins but occainsionally I give it a good sound thrashing.

[The PIT]

Guess what it still creating them. I think was a bad idea this.

[Gurm]

I find the idea of playing chess against computers as anything other than practice to be silly.

The fact that chessmasters still beat or even tie the computers is testament to the relative immaturity of chess programmes, considering that the computer knows all the possible moves in advance, and can rapidly sort them and compute probabilities and statistics.

It's MUCH more fun to play against human beings.

Even when they're random idiots on the Internet.1

- Gurm

[Wombat]

I like Dave's beer chess board.

[The PIT]

Originally posted by Gurm
I find the idea of playing chess against computers as anything other than practice to be silly.

The fact that chessmasters still beat or even tie the computers is testament to the relative immaturity of chess programmes, considering that the computer knows all the possible moves in advance, and can rapidly sort them and compute probabilities and statistics.

It's MUCH more fun to play against human beings.

Even when they're random idiots on the Internet.1

- Gurm

I used to enjoy playing against humans but then i got into a habit of boring them to death and waiting for them to make a mistake. I had seemed to dried up in my creative ideas. I suddenly realised I wasn't enjoying playing for my club and packed it up. My style of play used to be rip there heads off. Of course sometimes I over did it and lost brillantly but I enjoyed it. Nothing pleased more when people refused to play me again becuase they got a headache.
A friend of mine persuaded me to play a game in the pub and I fell back into my old habit of waiting for a mistake. He did and his position collasped within four moves.
You get some very funny people in chess but the arrogant ones are the best.
I played one and it was a game between club champions and we played a few friendlies first and I was messing around and he was being serious. He decided I couldn't play got very arrogant and got beaten very rapidly in the proper game. His face said it all.

[Ribbit]

I built GNU Chess on my box the other day. The documentation said "to test that it's working, you can type these commands, and you will see an 8-ply depth search [or something]. Modern computers will do this in a minute or two." Mine did it in 5 seconds

I knew I was useless at chess, but playing against the computer has redefined my uselessness to a whole new low. I'm measuring myself by how many moves I last before I'm checkmated. So far, I think my record is 27

There's an optional book of openings and closings which you can install. I won't be doing that for a while...

[thop]

Gurm, actually it is not so easy. Kramnik hit it quite on spot once when he said: The computer looks at 3 Mio. moves per second, i only look at one - the best.

[The PIT]

Also a chess programme never gets tired or distracted. It may get it's power turned off though .

Kasperov only managed a draw against Junior last time around. Give it another year and he'd probably lose.