mclure@SRI-UNIX@sri-unix (07/20/82)
Just had an interesting talk with that Dr. Irazoqui fellow ICD has hired to do their micro-computer chess program testing and has advertised his ICD consulting services in Chess Life. The current best micro is the Elite running on a 6502 at 4 mhz. A number of conflicting claims about its strength have been advanced. Everything from 1771 to 1950 with lots of data to support the claims. Irazoqui entered Elite in a normal human tournament (11 rounds) where the players were rated 1680-2100 in its open section. The time controls were 40/2 and 20/1. The Elite won the section with a score of 8 pts which resulted in a rating of 1915. Irazoqui says 11 games is obviously not enough. Further, he says that Elite is 1500-1600 positionally and 2000 tactically (all of this at 40/2). He has other data to support his claim that the Elite is really 1915 plus or minus 30 and discounts any claims that it is much lower than this. First, the Elo ratings seem highly inflated over just a couple years ago. Second, he performed a tournament in which Elite, Scisys Mark V, Champion, 2.5, and Savant played 10 games against each of the others. 2.5 had been rated in human tournaments at 1484. Champion had been rated by USCF at 1771, but some tests by Irazoqui had concluded 1726 was a more likely figure so he used that. The results were: Elite 30.5 pts Scisys 19.5 Champion 18.5 MCT 16 Savant 15.5 which also results in a rating of Elite of about 1915. However, experiments by other unamed investigators have shown Elite should be at least 100-150 points lower. Unfortunately I don't think any of these results have been published. Irazoqui predicts that if Belle and Elite were entered in the same long human tournament Belle should score not much more than 300 points better than Elite. Also, he feels that Belle's positional level is qualitatively lower than Nuchess and that the European micro-program Mephisto has at least the same positional sense as Belle but probably closer to Nuchess. He feels Nuchess has the best positional evaluation of any program. (an offspring of Chess 4.n) The next unit coming from Fidelity is something called Prestige, which Elite owners can upgrade to for a fee (no doubt rather expensive). Kathe Spracklen claims the Prestige will sacrifice up to a pawn or the Exchange for certain positional advantages and that it will sacrifice pieces for strong attacks against the enemy King, and that its endgame play is much better. Apparently they are working on the Prestige program from the ground up rather than just upgrading the program as was done from Champion to Elite. They have some Russian master and teacher named Pochinski(?) working with them on it. Also, the Prestige will run on the same hardware as Elite but will have 16K of RAM instead of 4K. The intended release date is sometime in September. She says the Prestige will be entered in the upcoming U.S. Open and is predicting a rating of close to 2000. In this month's Chess Life, ICD has some ads offering a Computer Chess Digest Annual prepared by Irazoqui available in a few months, with all this information, game listings, and more. It seems worthwhile ($10).