Computer Chess Questions

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WhereDoesTheHorseGo

I'm having my computer play itself in an IPON format tournament (5 minutes/game with a 3 second increment/move), and I have a couple of questions.

1) When the engines make a move, they give text after their moves. For example: 23.Rh7 +0.22/d19/11s. The only question I have here is what is the middle section, "d19", mean? The next move it may show /d16/ and then /d17/ and back to /d19/. Does that value represent the depth of its thinking?

2) In the brackets, it lists the Players, Round, Points, SB, and Place. What is SB?

DeepGreene

Agreed that the "d" value = depth, probably in half-moves.

And I got this from www.playchess.de:

What does SB in the tournament table mean?

This is an acronym of the "Sonneborn-Berger value". It is used to create a unique ranking even if two or more players have the same number of points.

The idea is the following: let two players lead a tournament with say, 4 out of 6 possible points - who should be ranked as number 1 and who as number 2?
Answer: the one who made his points against the stronger player will be the winner of the tournament.

The Sonneborn-Berger value (SB) is a measure of that. The higher your SB the stronger were the opponents you defeated. The SB value is calculated as two times the points of the opponents you defeated plus the points of the opponents you drew with. With the SB value in effect, it is more important to win against a player that makes 3 points in total than against a player that makes only 1 (the first gives you 6, the second only 2 SB points).

The SB value is used to create a unique ranking in our tournaments for only one reason: Grand Prix points. For the question of promotion and demotion the SB value is irrelevant, since ALL winners are promoted and ALL losers are demoted.

WhereDoesTheHorseGo

Awesome. Thank you. :)

lucam92

what engine do you use?

WhereDoesTheHorseGo

I'm testing these free ones against Deep Rybka 64-bit: Houdini 1.5a x64, Fire 1.31 x64, Stockfish 2.01 x64, Critter Chess 1.0 x64, Komodo64 1.3.

Uclancy677

learning, want to study games from a data base . ...is there one I can download without subscribing to something, or being harassed with ads, that is easy to use? thanks