Slashdot Mirror
4th Computer Chess Tournament
An anonymous reader writes: "The 4th computer chess tournament is being held online at Internet Chess Club over the next two weekends. Over 50 chess programs are involved, from commercial engines to amateur homebrews. Most will be operated by their authors. Details at CCT4 homepage. Last tournament (CCT3) there was live commentary by titled human chess masters. If you're a fan of chess or computer chess programming, login to ICC this weekend as a guest and watch the action."
I think it would make it wholly more entertaining if they printed out move-lists and provided a viewer which reproduced the moves, say one or two a second.
It'd make the games more interesting to those of us who actually play (and don't just code chess), and it would get the public involved (can you picture a CNN short on this without having any sort of visual representation - it's the only way it'll get coverage!)
It's because Chessmaster isn't nearly as strong as other engines out there. But that's because there is a much wider focus with Chessmaster: they teach you how to play chess, how to improve, they had their own online chess server, etc.
The engines competing are just that: engines, and they are *very* fine tuned. Which is why your hardware doesn't matter a whole lot... It's much more important to weight the attributes of how your program plays and to give it a more thorough opening book suitable to how you set the attributes, then it is to have a little more CPU power.