"Russell Reagan" wrote in message . net...
"Marian Cascaval" wrote

I don't get it.

Indeed. See below.

Why have been decided to play with Fritz since it has been outranked
by Shredder 7.04 (in SSDF list) and it seems it will be outranked by
Junior 8 too?

Even if the Morsch team intend to come up with Fritz 9 or something
the Chess Base team would not know how the program will perform
compared to others.

It seems ChessBase are only interested to advertise their leading
software when it comes to big events and not to provide the chess
world with the toughest battle between man and machine.

First, the ELO rating difference between Shredder and Fritz on the SSDF
rating list is tiny, and meaningless. Either program can beat the other one.
Second, computer vs. computer doesn't translate to human vs. computer.
Shredder could be the best engine when playing other engines, and Fritz
might be the best when playing humans (not saying it is, but you can't use
the SSDF computer vs. computer tiny rating differences as support for
questioning "why Fritz?").

Actually, Fritz probably manifests its greatest playing strength
against other Chess Engines, and is a tad less impressive against
humans. With Junior, the situation is reversed. I expect that Junior
would be the most formidable challenger vs. humans.

Of course, Fritz, Junior, and Schredder are all solid 2700+ ELO
players. It doesn't take much of an inaccuracy for even a Kramnik or a
Kasparov to lose to the programs. The onlyh way to get a good
assessment of the programs' relative strengths would be for a Kramnik,
Kasparov, and Anand, who all have markedly different playings styles,
to each play matches of length (say 12-16 games) against all three of
the aforemention chess engines. But I doubt that Che$$Ba$e would want
to have its stable of programs competing against both humans AND each
other.



Besides, what is wrong with a company marketing their premiere product?

Nothing, except that it needs to sell a lot of copies of its
software in order to pay for the promotion.

Most chessplayers would probably want to forget about the match, if
they could save 20% off of the current prices.

One wonders how much sales of the featured Chess engine go up,
after the "product" is marketed through a high profile match.

Do non-tournament chessplayers rush out to buy Fritz or Junior
after these matches?