Chess System Tal
Vladimir Medvedev
really play in Tal'-style? Is it true that CST is very smart in tactics as
some people say? And what about it's positional skills?
--
VRM
rom...@janus.uio.no
>Does anybody know something about Chess System Tal' engine? Does this engine
>really play in Tal'-style?
Sort of. It is by far the most aggressive, speculative and human-like
chess program I have ever played against. It also makes lots of interesting
sacrifices, many of which are not really sound.
> Is it true that CST is very smart in tactics as
>some people say?
No. Compared to most of the other commercial chess programs, CST is actually
rather weak at tactics (of course, it is still tactically very sharp
compared to most humans). It is a very slow program, searching only about
4000 nodes per second on my Pentium Pro 200MHz (Fritz searches around
150000 nodes per second on the same machine). The reason for the slow
speed is of course that it has much more chess knowledge than the other
programs!
CST is probably not the strongest program you can find, especially not
at blitz levels. Other programs would probably be preferable for use in
analysis. CST is tactically slow, and you can never trust its evaluations
because of the speculative style. I am quite sure it would perform better
if it were tuned to play slightly less aggressive. However, it is by far
the most interesting program to play against! If I could only own one
chess program, I would choose CST.
Tord