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Strength of Sargon III on Commodore 64

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Daniel Marsalone

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Jan 8, 1993, 9:02:08 AM1/8/93
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Now I know that this question might seem to be way out there, but I
would like to know the approximate strength of Sargon III on the Commodore
64.

I used to have a C-64 and recently I gave all of my Commodore software
to a paisan. When I was over at his house, we discovered the floppy with
Sargon III and now that I'm hip to chess, I decided to play it to see how
tough it was. It was kind of tough to beat but I did beat it three out of
three. My friend who hasn't been playing seriously for more than six months
had hard time of it and lost a couple (while winning none).

My paisan really wanted to know how strong the program was so that he
could determine his strength when he finally is able to trash the machine.



Another related question... How strong is the chess cartridge for the
TI99/4A???? This game was a heck of a lot easier to beat than the C-64
Sargon. In the endgame, the Texas Instruments chess blew it. All you would
have to do to beat it would be to remain with an equal amount of material
and just trade down until there were few pieces on the board. Then the
computer would just make a big blunder and lose the game. This seems weird.
Since there are fewer pieces on the board to "think" about, why does the
computer make worse moves than it makes in the opening and middle game?

Any info will be greatly appreciated.

-- Via DLG Pro v0.995

Daniel Marsalone Daniel Marsalone Daniel Marsalone
Internet: daniel_m...@agwbbs.new-orleans.LA.US
UUCP: rex!agwbbs!daniel_marsalone

fra...@csvaxe.csuohio.edu

unread,
Jan 8, 1993, 10:57:59 AM1/8/93
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In article <Daniel_Mar...@agwbbs.new-orleans.LA.US>, Daniel_M...@agwbbs.new-orleans.LA.US (Daniel Marsalone) writes:
> Another related question... How strong is the chess cartridge for the
> TI99/4A???? This game was a heck of a lot easier to beat than the C-64
> Sargon. In the endgame, the Texas Instruments chess blew it. All you would
> have to do to beat it would be to remain with an equal amount of material
> and just trade down until there were few pieces on the board. Then the
> computer would just make a big blunder and lose the game. This seems weird.
> Since there are fewer pieces on the board to "think" about, why does the
> computer make worse moves than it makes in the opening and middle game?
>
> Any info will be greatly appreciated.
>
> -- Via DLG Pro v0.995
>
> Daniel Marsalone Daniel Marsalone Daniel Marsalone
> Internet: daniel_m...@agwbbs.new-orleans.LA.US
> UUCP: rex!agwbbs!daniel_marsalone
>

The fact that there are fewer pieces doesn't allow the computer to search
many more ply ahead. The search tree grows extremely fast. Perhaps you've
watched some chess programs like Sargon "think." If you look at the ply, you
notice that the ply increases quickly at first and then gets slower and slower.
The effect of fewer pieces is not nearly enough to counteract the expanding
tree at higher plies, so the the same amount of thinking time may only yield
an extra 2 or 3 ply.

Another thing to keep in mind.... Depending on how the chess algorithm
works, it is easy for the program to miss things in the endgame that are
obvious to humans. The easiest way to illustrate this is to consider a
situation where you have a couple pawns at their starting positions and
so does the computer. There are four pawns on the board and each is 5 or
6 moves away from queening. Even if there are just two such pawns on the
board (one for each player), the computer may have to look 12 ply ahead to
see who queens first and what happens immediately afterwards. I'm
exaggerating things a bit here since I believe current chess algorithms are
a bit smarter than that, but the point is that things that may be obvious to
you may not be obvious to the computer and there is not a very significant
increase in search depth due to the lower number of pieces on the board to
compensate for the computer's stupidity in the endgame.

-Andy

P.S. My connection to my MIT account is down so I'm writing from one of
my other accounts with the wimpy newsreader. It's so easy to get spoiled
with Xwindows....

P.P.S. It's hard to get used to the fact that we can now talk about
chess on rec.games.chess. What a concept!


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