Dann Corbit wrote: ↑Wed Mar 03, 2021 12:33 pm
Graham Banks is the George Washington of testers (there are many others who impress me greatly but GB has labored for decades).
Please put your candidates for great testers below:
Added to all the others already mentioned in the thread, I'd put one more name on the list:
Andreas Strangmüller.
His FGRLs (many different TCs to choose from his site:)
belong to the best lists on the net for sure for quite a time now.
Especially the pools of CPU- und GPU- using engines with such low error bars are not easy to be found nowadays, are they regards
we start testing from the first time of available Winboard engines in a group of Kai Skibbe and Christian Koch (first Winboard rating list, long time before CEGT and CCRL). Have a look in readme file from Elostat. At this time different people like to test with Chessbase GUI: Gerhard Sonnabend and Stefan Pohl, Wolfgang Battig for the German chess newspaper "Rochade".
My list:
- Gerhard Sonnabend at first (today CEGT), he offer for more as 25 years some interesting experiments. In the past on his Dual Pentium I 800Mhz with ponder = on, I am working with Dual Pentium I 733Mhz and results with ponder = on, later with Dual Xeon 2.8 and ponder = on results. I have a lot of respect for his work.
- Wolfgang Batting (today CEGT).
- Werner Schüle, with a lot of helps for programmers and bug reports.
- Graham Banks (of course Graham).
- Stefan Pohl (many experience in testing chess programs).
- Andreas Stangmüller (a very strong work he do).
- For Sedat the same as for myself ... we do our best but not continuously year by year!
But the most fun with I had in Winboard times with
Carlos E.A. Drake and Carlos Pesce, very nice guys ... 200% Winboarders!
A very strong tester and teamplayer is Johan Havegheer.
And we all should not forget the heros ...
Leo Dijksman (NDL), Patrick Buchmann (FRA), Arnaud LOHEAC (maybe he do the most from all of us), the SSDF and all the people from the older chess computer community. Like Kurt Utzinger and his friend Rolf Bühler, so many others ... a great community ... schachcomputer.info!! Klaus Wlotzka (CSS Rating list, today Klaus helps me with his Excel knowledge).
And my chess friend, live many years in Tonga. Oh, I have more as 1 Million engine games from him (60-minutes games). I told him often he should public the work but he have more his sailing boot in the brain.
Best
Frank
I forgot Ingo Bauer!
Also a long time tester, before he started IPON!
Last edited by Frank Quisinsky on Thu Mar 04, 2021 1:40 pm, edited 5 times in total.
I think some people might not realize how important these testing bodies are.
They tell everyone how strong the engines are from an independent point of view.
If you are looking for a weak engine, the data will help.
If you are looking for a strong engine, the data will help.
Most engine developers do not have a mighty army of machines like the SF group.
So the testers do a mighty service for them.
We can find out if an engine has bugs.
So many good things come from testing.
It is also fun sometimes to go and watch the games live as they are played.
Taking ideas is not a vice, it is a virtue. We have another word for this. It is called learning.
But sharing ideas is an even greater virtue. We have another word for this. It is called teaching.