Single Comment

M.Winther:
| Muller, why don't you make use of the immensely strong and cunning 
| Gambit Fruit, written in C, convert it to Forth using c2forth?

Because it does not play any variants, for one. Strong Chess engines
(including my own stronger engine, Joker) normally achieve their superior
performance by exploiting all kind of knowledge on special properties of
the FIDE army (like maximum number of different pieces, the fact that all
leapers except King are automaticaly Knights, and that you have only one
King, that pins can only occur on ortogonals and diagonals, and that in
such a case you can always move along the pin line). And of course a large
part of their strength derives from a lot of strategic knowledge on the
orthodox pieces, (e.g well-tuned Piece-Square Tables) which would be
totally lacking on any fairy pieces you would introduce (even if this was
technically possible). This would stongly bias any strength comparison in
favor of the orthodox pieces, while removing the knowledge (if you cold
locate it, and remove it without doing any unintended fatal damage in a
program that you don't know because it is not your own) is very likely to
destroy the brilliance of the program and reduce it to a mediocre level
that you could have achieved with a fraction of the effort had you written
your own engine from scratch.

I don't understand where this Forth mania comes from. So you can convert
Fruit to Forth, and are left with an approximately 3 times slower Fruit
that is about 120 Elo weaker than the original one. Now what? The fact
that it is written in the same language as the Axiom engine does not mean
it can do anything what the Axiom engine does. The message is not in the
lanuage, it is in what you say.