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.