ChessCarpenter: SMIRF has been improved as shown in its game against the renewed ChessV http://www.gothicchesslive.com/javascript/game.php?gameid=1606 . Despite of playing some interesting games there against the rewritten Gothic Vortex, its actually betas seem to be unable to dominate therein. Vortex currently has been rebuilt as a 64 Bit program and uses a matching high speed hardware. This and the lack of a freely available Gothic Vortex program, which would be reflecting its new abilities, make it difficult to compare those programs under equal conditions.

Despite of that Gothic Vortex relaunch done by a professional team and those used different technology, my first written amateur chess engine SMIRF clearly has shown its underlying intelligence. Be aware, that in those games a 60KB sized SMIRF multivariant engine without any opening library was facing a huge specialized system consisting of a nearly 8MB big program and an almost Terabyte sized set of looking up tables.

Now SMIRF needs to leave its first extemporized structures and to be rewritten in a second rethought amateur approach, which will need a lot of my rare spare time. Actually an X-UCI engine twin of SMIRF is planned to be written for to enhance SMIRF's testability using common 8x8 UCI GUIs.

Remember, there is a free download possibility of SMIRF's basic donationware version at: http://www.chessbox.de/Compu/schachsmirf_e.html , showing that SMIRF just has won a main prize in the latest C++ programming contest sponsored by Borland.

SMIRF Engine: Hi Reinhard,

Just so you know, Gothic Vortex is still 32-bit, not 64-bit. At one time, Ed Trice tried a parallel-processing 64-bit version, but after making too many changes (new piece values, new searching, parallel code, 64-bit code) it was impossible to debug. Ed reverted back to a 32-bit single CPU version and just improved the evaluation function. Ed no longer has a 64-bit compiler, and he will be making future versions of Vortex under Mac OS X.

There is no "professional team" that works on Gothic Vortex. It is just Ed. Several people did contribute PUBLIC DOMAIN code to the project, and they are given credit in the program "about box". But clearly Ed does not employ Eugene Namilov, Marc Bourzachutsky, and Andrew Katach! Gil Dodgen ported the Crafty search engine to the 80-bit world, and Ed threw out the Crafty evaluation function and made a Gothic Chess evaluation function. Sounds simple, but it was a lot of work, 98% of it done by two people, in their spare time.

And, the "size" of Gothic Vortex is mostly due to graphics. All of those pictures in the about box, especially of the 6'5" blonde model with her legs so long, coupled with the marble board pattern at 24-bit color take up a lot of space. The size of the Gothic Vortex search engine is not more than 24K larger than the Crafty DOS search engine, making it under 100K.

You and Ed discussed the speed differences in your hardware when you played on GothicChessLive. He had a 2.4 GHz system, you have a 2.0 GHz system, which is only a 20% difference. Such a difference is insignificant.

Ed rewrote Gothic Vortex to search for attacks, and this is purely a software innovation. Still, this does not mean Vortex is perfect. M_TAL on GothicChessLive.com beat the new Vortex 2 times (after losing a few games). You will remember he was ChessMaster1000 on here, as well as WhiteTower, ChicagoBulls, and maybe 1 or 2 others. While these were game/15 minute controls (rather fast) you have to give George credit for slugging it out and coming on top.

It is my hope that we will not longer see on German discussion boards your posts saying "..and here SMIRF beats that former #1 program, Gothic Vortex..." when you are really running your program against the FREE version of Vortex that only does 7-ply searches and moves in a fraction of a second. I think it's obvious now that the Gothic Vortex program is much stronger than the free version.

ChessCarpenter: Hi CC. I am not sure, what this discussion should be good for. My informations have been different to yours, but being the same concerning the multiprocessing version. The 64 Bit version nevertheless seems to be at hands as to be seen in that link to the Vortex order offer. If the speed difference (and its not mentioned big RAM size) would be without influence on the game results, then the question would be, why to use that then. If Vortex really should have gained its last six victories using a 32 Bit engine, that would find my full respect.

All that does not change the fact, that the amateur one man project of a multivariant SMIRF engine actually could not defeat current Vortex playing under those conditions. Nevertheless it is true, that the improved SMIRF has won those mentioned games against available prior versions of Vortex, where there also has been one newly installed only time limited Gold version, which has been the number one last year.

But those wins have been mentioned not to claim SMIRF now to be the number one program, but to underline its made progresses and also to provoke the releasing of a free testing version of the new Gothic Vortex program, which I still have not at hands, whereas SMIRF indeed is available in a free basic donationware version to everybody, which program could be used for testing and comparing purposes simply by giving it a plus of actually about 60% time.

As long as there is nothing comparable from Vortex to be downloaded, nobody but the purchasers of the new Vortex program would be able to test both engines playing Gothic Chess under equal conditions. But a test also should include a competition on 10x8 Capablanca Random Chess, Janus and Embassy. To focus merely on Gothic Chess is not appreciating SMIRF's 8x8 and 10x8 multivariant abilities.