On Feb 23, 11:28 am, "J.D. Walker" wrote:

It seems very simple to me. If a program can not play by the rules, its
rating is zero.

Hey, Fritz looks up its opening moves in a
"book" it has stored on my machine-- which
is cheating. And Shredder has a lookup
table where it stores prefabricated answers
to test questions I have to solve on the fly!
It is understood that programmers just aren't
smart enough to do the job correctly, so we
let them cheat a bit; Sanny's programmers
aren't smart enough to even figure out the
basics, so why not let them cheat even more?


Well, we are not really trying to assign an
official rating anyhow; all we are doing is
trying to estimate the program's *strength*,
when and if it does play legal moves.


-- help bot