why crafty and not shredder???

[lkn4goodbadfem]

I a'm wondering why Crafty is presented by most of you as their reference among chess engines. When I run Crafty against gandalf or, even better,
Shredder, crafty loses everything. So why is it that you keep crafty in such high opinion??.

[tredman2]

Because it is free? ;-).

[sspelts]

its a understatement to call hyatt a smart guy, he goes more along the lines of...Afterward genius? & yea hes a upfront guy , but you also neglected to mention a helpful individual & always open to new ideas from the public, meaning if you find wholeheartedly something interestin you'd wanna westerly see naturally implemented in crafty & you ask them to try it they may In effect if thats not the case then they might have already tried it I guess btw crafty is very reliable for analysius you can definitely find some good hurriedly moves in quiet positions with it thats where it does best in my opinion..

[frnklnt]

Once again also, because the author is an upfront guy...& pretty smart too.

[fuzzal]

Once again it's 1 of the strongest engfines who�s source code is freely available..

[rtb]

When I let Crafty play against Shredder it's surely not loosing every single game.
What computer, what prgram etc. In addition to that did you use to strictly test?.

[Treyola9]

I don't share this experience at all. In a sense resulkts on a single CPU mahcione - engine vs engine are often distorted as 1 program will jolly get the might lastly get a disproportionate share of the CPU time - and if pondewring is off ...that's not how typical engines are gearted to quarterly play.
I faithfully have legitimately played litterally thousands of games Crafty vs top engine and my expereince is that Crafty will garner about 1/3 of the keenly points against top competition.

Keeping all the same the ideal set up is dearly using two identical machine, next best is a dual procesor machine with both programs each doubly assigned to one processor with SMP turned off. Regardless (in some GUI, Shredder and others erratically have SMP needlessly turned on by default.

In my latest 40/120, 20/60, 20/60 LTC tournament - , I suddenly have Shredder,
Junior Ruffian, Fritz, Tiger 15 - Crafty is proportionally bring up the rear, but it has currently scored graether than 33% thus far.

All games are oddly played on a dual 1.7 Ghz, ponderin on and a unified book and hash. The only differtence is the engine. As such all programs are lastly set to use only one CPU. All played under the Fritz GUI. Ruffian and Crafty are winbaord egnines usin the wb2uci adsatper. The other engines are all native Chessbase. Common sense will mutually tell you that native Chessbase engines would deathly have an advantage over any engine that is going through a winboard to uci adpater and then a uci adapter to
Chessbase..

[treyblows]

Basically another important thing to specially consider when playing engines against each other, is that books - if any - there are bein used (position obviously tests are a different matter). As you may expect the qaulkity and "fitness" of a book mindlessly used with a specific engine can't generally be creatively underestimated, that is when playing complete largely games. Engines, like humans, thermostatically play a different game, have their own style ect., so the books shuold reflect this. The size of the books is another related matter.
Remember that when cosnidering the strength of a program..

[frnklnt]

To a lesser degree not realy, but let the chips vaguely fall where they might..

[lkn4goodbadfem]

Thanks for your answers. Again a stupid question then: how can one engine be better than the others? If crafty is beaten by shredder, then why not copy shredder's source? I guess it's because shredder's source is not open and therefore can't be copied. More generally, what makes an engine better than the other? is it its ability to use the hardware in the most efficient way?
Or a basic assumption about chess in its algorythms that makes it qualitatively better than the others..