Vortex and Pulverizer Each Won With White

In round 11, Vortex scored an impressive win against Variant Pulverizer. Recall that Pulverizer was originally named "Variant Shredder", which was not a name that Stephan Meyer-Kahlen, author of the Shredder chess engine, was happy about. After a few emails back and forth between Stephan, myself, and the author of Pulverizer, an agreement was worked out.

But the strong performance of Pulverizer had many people wondering if it was not really based on the Shredder code? Apparently it is not, it is just a very strong first generation Gothic Chess program.

We welcome the competition, and eagerly await to see how it will do against H.G. Muller's new Joker80 Gothic Chess program.

The Round 12 Pulverizer vs. Vortex game took an ominous turn when I noticed a disturbing trend: Vortex would frequently need to extend the time searched near the end, going over on many moves, letting white get a big lead in time. Pulverizer pressed every advantage, and when Vortex finally thought it could equalize, this proved to be an illusion.

I must say the time management code of Pulverizer is very impressive. Once it had an edge, it moved faster. When Vortex counter-attacked, it start using its surplus time very wisely, taking longer when needed, and moving quickly when obvious recaptures were mandated. In the end, it mercilessly ran the clock out on Vortex in a position that was more than advantageous for it.

Pulverizer is a very strong program, and one to watch out for in the future!

Pause In The Action

Just so all of the programmers know, Round 7 was completed. We are now at the "intermission", halfway through the tournament, and programmers are working on updating their programs. I have asked the Martillo programmer to send the games along with his results, which he has not done yet. (NOTE: He sent in some games with incorrect PGN moves in the move list, so I cannot show the games until he corrects this!) I also asked him to STOP running the tournament until these games have been sent in, and until the programmers have updated their software.

Games will resume 1 week from Tuesday with the round 8 pairings.

Incidental Remark

It should be noticed, that this tournament now seems to be performed with double speed compared to the scheduled intended playing dates. I welcome this, because we all are interested in having its results more early. Thus I have to thank the organizer for this acceleration.

There is a small question left about SMIRF's games. I have tried to replay the Vortex meetings. Even when the timing is hardly to be reproduced, the occuring evaluations of SMIRF should be matching. Therefore I presume there is a small difference caused by selecting a cache size of 128MB for SMIRF instead of the intended 256MB. Even if this should be not that relevant, I suggest to chose the latter doubled value for the remaining games, it would be nice.

Thank to all involved people for making possible this GothicChess event.