Hardware on ICC

[Ponti]

It seems Quad 6600 is "standard" hardware used by top ten computer-accounts on ICC, but... blitz best players are crowded with GMs, which for a ;long time did not happen... what is going on?

A Quad Xeon is better than Q6600 for chess?

[Marc Lacrosse]

blitz best players are crowded with GMs, which for a ;long time did not happen... what is going on?

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best blitz C
Blitz                     
3768 Ashvili(C)          
3724 Beast(C)            
3655 depressnyak(GM)     
3593 sinferno(C)         
3575 quangliem(GM)       
3529 TransWarp(C)        
3437 Orcrist(C)          
3390 Benefactor(GM)      
3380 Smallville(GM)      
3372 A-Adly(GM)          
3352 tapuax(GM)  

If you type "best blitz" only human players are listed.
"best blitz C" gives you the list hereover : 50% computers and the two top spots are computer ones.

Moreover the "best" command only lists actually active accounts.

For example BigMomma (by Nick Carlin : Flyingfatman on Playchess) still has the highest rating but did not play blitz games recently :

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Information about BigMomma(C) (Last disconnected Sun Dec 16 2007 16:37):
              rating [need] win  loss  draw total   best
Bullet          3312  [7]  1216    87   194  1497   3326 (15-Nov-2007) 
Blitz           3840  [8]  2801    79   445  3325   3928 (19-Jan-2007) 
Standard        3046  [3]   320    43   143   506   3107 (28-Aug-2006) 

Another point lies in the fact that on ICC computer accounts are not allowed to challenge human players. They have to wait for a human challenging them. None of the best rated human players do try this

And most top rated computer accounts do not accept challenges by other computer accounts so that their present high rating is not threatened.

All this makes ICC listings very conservative .

My own account (Tweetie) is number 9 in bullet (ultrasfast games) and number three in standard (slow) games but could not go higher than number 55 in blitz simply because it does not find any high-rated human or computer opponent willing to play so far.

By-the-way Tweetie is a watercooled overclocked Q6600 quad.

So this seems to be what is presently required for being amongst best computer players on ICC.

Marc