Well, whatever works for you. Cycling is more than riding uphill, and at best someone good at the latter could be called World Champion Uphill Cycling. The real winner of the Tour de France is considered the one who whon the yellow sweater, not the one who won the dotted one.M ANSARI wrote:The cycling analogy simply doesn't work here, sorry! But if you insist on using cycling as an analogy, a better one would be that having a special "book" cooked up for an engine would be in "cycling" terms the same as having someone put the bike and biker on one of the cars riding along as soon as the difficult hilly part comes along. Instead of getting the bike and biker prepared for the hill beforehand ... well hell, putting them in the car and driving through that part quickly fixes that!
An utterly ridiculous theory, one could add, as the book would have to be vastly larger that the number of particles in the known Universe... And even in a game where it might be conceivable because the book would have to be just 'Planet-sized', it would be far easier to make an engine that would search to game-end, and plays perfectly on that account. (Because it exploits the time dimension, and does not need all positions it considers to be present at the same time, but can go through trillions or quaddrillions of positions per second. So your theoretical point in fact hjust worls in the opposite direction: it is building the book that is the biggest technical challenge. An engine is just a stupid calculator.Theoretically you could create a perfect comprehensive book that could play and beat every engine on earth without a single line of chess playing code.
Well, so you discovered Chess is basically a boring game. Some think Soccer is a boring game, and it would definitely become much more lively if it was played with two balls in stead of just a single one. But is that a reason to organize a tourney with those rules, and then call it the 'real' WC Soccer?While I certainly do enjoy the book preparation for a chess engine match, most of the other posters who participated in getting the right setup for TCEC thought it was not a good idea to include a specialized engine book for each engine that participates ... and I have to admit that I agree with them now.
That some opening positions of Chess960 are 'totally won for one side' has never been proven, and experiments with engines suggest it is not true at all. It is you that claims the rules of Chess should be changed by making the first dozen-or-so moves being prescribed. At direct odds with the claim the original rules have 'withstood the test of time'.As for Chess960 ... well again it is totally different than normal chess and I feel it needs to weed out some openings that are totally won for one side. But normal Chess has withstood the test of time and so far black has always managed to find a draw, and that is most likely due to the fact that from the start position the game is drawn.
