Dann Corbit wrote:As far as SF being useless for analysis, that is simply wrong.
I don't think anyone, even Lyudmil, would argue with you about that. I also wonder why you bring it up, as I don't see anyone here stating that SF is useless for analysis. Is it a straw man argument or simply a failure to read carefully?
Dann Corbit wrote:It is the best engine for analysis of quiet positions, which is what most chess positions in the real world are.
I believe it's been less than two months since I posted an asmFish-Houdini game where in a relatively quiet position White withdrew his dark-squared bishop to h2, pushed g3 and sat quietly nursing a drawish eval while being effectively a piece down, for the next dozen or so moves while Black proceeded to quietly tighten the noose around White's neck.
In the past two years there have been numerous posts about an alarming number of positions SF evaluates as 0.00. Someone even coined the term "Drawfish". I personally have seen hundreds of such positions on Let's Check, ranging from quiet to turbo-charged. There is a current thread discussing another such case and SF's "tunnel vision".
Then you have the AlphaZero match, a rather convincing demonstration that SF doesn't understand the first thing about quiet positions.
You seem strangely oblivious to all that. Not so long ago as last summer you stated
here
Dann Corbit wrote:If a really strong engine failed to solve a problem, it probably means we did not give it enough time. Even bad pruning decisions will eventually be overcome by sufficient depth, because there is no algorithm that prunes down to zero (unless it is a pure loss or unless the program has a serious bug).
which is a belief I myself had been an adherent of for years (didn't I contribute hundreds of CPU-hours to your STS tests a while ago?), but which now sounds to me as plausible as the belief that if you tried to get to the Moon in a hot-air balloon and failed, that just means that you need a lot more time and balloons.
I largely agree with the rest of your post, but like you said, that's neither here nor there.