Single Comment

To Derek: You don't seem to have grasped anything of what I am saying, and
are just ranting based on your misconceptions. For one, the
Battle-of-the-Goths tournament was played at 1 hour per game per side
(55'+5'/move, the time on the clocks is displayed in the viewer). And
you call it speed Chess. Poof, there goes half your argument up in smoke.
Not that it was any good to begin with: it is well known and amply tested
that the quality of computer play only is a very weak function of time
control. Results at these long time controls, after 20 days of non-stop
play for 280 games, are practically the same as in earlier blitz and
bullet tourneys.

The fact that you ask how 'my theory was constructed' is shocking.
Didn't you notice I did not present any theory at all? I just reported my
OBSERVATION that quiet positions with C in stead of A do not have a larger
probability to win the game, and that in my opinion thus any concept of
'piece value' that does not ascribe nearly equal value to A and C is
worse than useless. The near equality between A and C shows up at any time
control I tried, with any engine I tried. I furthermore find that piece
combinations that perform equal at one time control, do so at other time
controls as well (except that at extremely short time control, the value
of the Knight is suppressed a little, as the engine starts to bungle many
Knight endings for lack of depth to see promotions in time).

So what have I think I proved by the battle-of-the-Goths long TC tourney
about the value of A and C? Nothing of course! Did I claim I id? No, that
was just a figment of your imagination! I mentioned the tourney simply as
a source of high-quality games that shows:
1) Joker80 knows how to play a game of 10x8 Chess, and does so better than
Smirf (oh, sorry about the 'insult', how politically incorrect of me to
say such a thing...)
2) Smirf loses many games against weaker opponents (that ended below it)
from positions that it evaluated as +2 or +3, and that these obvious
misevaluations stongly correlate with trading an Archbishop for other
material.

As to your derogative remarks against the results of bullet games: before
I can take that serious, I would like to see you can beat Joker80 when it
is playing at 40/1', even with a time-odds factor of 60. From the way you
are talking about this it is not at all clear to me if you could actually
beat a 'fan', given 1 hour of thinking time... And if you would start
with B+N against Joker80's A, I would be really surprised if Joker80
would not crush you even when given 10 seconds per game! It might be of
interet to know that prof. Hyatt develops Crafty (one of the best
open-source Chess engines) based on 40/1' games, as he has found that
this is as accurate as using longer TC for relative performance
measurement, and that Rybka (the best engine in the World) is tuned
through games of 40 moves per second.

The method you used (testing the effect of changing the piece values,
rather than the effect of changing the pieces) is highly inferior, and
needs about 100 times as many games to get the statistical noise down to
the same level as my method. (Because in most games, the mis-evaluated
pieces would still be traded against each other.) So how many long TC
games did you play? Two million?

If you are not prepared to face the facts, this discussion is pointless.
Play a few dozen games with Smirf, at any time control you feel
trustworthy, where one side lacks A and the other B+N, and see who is
crushed. When you have done that, and report the results and games, we are
in a position to discuss this further. Until then, the rest of the World
beware that your theory of piece values sucks in the extreme!