Guten Morgen,

Ich schreibe mal auf Englisch weil oft ist es schwer mich auf Deutsch richtig auszudruecken.

I am surprised to see that people would really assume that I would be continuing these tests just to prove that I am right and you are wrong. It has absolutely nothing to do with this, especially since I am hoping that you all realize that the chances of finding the right parameter configuration would be much harder than finding a needle in a haystack and would take about a thousand years.

What these tests do show very well even after testing only 10 parameter configurations is that there exists enough move variation to change the whole behavior of the Horvath program. In fact these 10 parameter tests have shown already that from initial 11 move deviations with Igor and Ivan playing standard parameter #5 you are down to only about 4 move deviations with Igor and 2 move deviations with Ivan by adding the other 9 tested parameters. This surely has to provide some good indications that it would be possible to find the Igor style and the Ivan style within the other 99,999,999,999,990 parameters that have not been tried yet. I am certainly not going to try them. I don't have the time, nor a long enough life or even interest in this.

Add to this the new test that show 3 possible versions (or start configurations) you now have a situation where you have to test 3 x 100,000,000,000,000. So which one do you test? Best guess would be Legend 2 since we know that Excalibur sold this computer just before selling Ivan.

So what is so special about Ivan other than it being 2 MHz faster and removal of parameters? The Voice? There is nothing magical that needs to happen when you add voice to a computer as far as I am concerned. You don’t have to add that programming language into the chess program itself to accommodate voice. That would be a very long winded approach and far too much work. In fact I suspect that the voice program is a totally independent program that runs concurrently with the chess program and just reacts to the finger presses on the keys and chess board and the computer sensory board response impulses. It does not affect the chess program in any way at all. Therefore probably you can add voice to any chess computer if the manufacturer wanted to. No magic here. The same probably applies with adding help features for preprogrammed position setups. There is probably no magic here as well, it is probably a separate program that runs concurrently when activated. So all these types of differences are in my opinion just misdirection’s to add different experiences and choices to future customers, while the base chess program remains virtually unchanged, unless of course the actual chess programmer sent in a different update version which was then used. Who is to say that a programmer did not send in two or three or four versions of his programs which allowed the manufacturer to choose whatever version he felt like for his next computer design? The manufacturer may have even asked for multiple versions when engaging a programmer for testing purposes.

It is a pity that we often choose to ignore common daily life logic. I don't care at the end of the day who wrote the program, but I am not going to waste my time pursuing not proven assumptions or opinions that have no foundation of truth behind them. As far as I am concerned Igor, Ivan and as a matter of fact all Excalibur's remain as "Programmer Unknown" until proven facts are provided. My website shows them as Unknown; my test report photos here in these forum posts show them as Unknown.

Having said that, I do strongly lean towards thinking that all Excalibur are based around 3 programmers, Levy, Danielsen and Horvath. This, I think is much more likely than someone in China that no one has ever heard of, writing a quality program or even Ron Nelson a production director at Excalibur whose chess programming limitations at Fidelity are well known to everyone, all of a sudden writing a quality program 20 years later.

A man is walking down the street with his girlfriend and takes this photo. His girlfriend sees him take the photo and reacts angrily to her boyfriend. Take a look at the photo and can you see why the girlfriend reacts angrily and says “How could you?” to her boyfriend. The boyfriend responded to her “How could I not?”:


Regarding the Tests themselves that I have posted here, how many of you knew previously that there are maybe 3 or even 4 versions of Horvath? I suspect no one did. I did not know that. So therefore is it not interesting to find out about this?

In my first test, how many of you noticed that the two 15th century player performances were rated as well? How many of you compared the results of the computers against the two human players to see that they were in fact stronger then 15th century chess players? Were you being misdirected? I suspect yes, because after all none of you asked any questions. Or am I experiencing apathy instead?

I repeated the test with a 18th century game. Did any of you notice the performance improvement from the 18th century players? How did this compare to the computers tested? Were the human players an equal match to the computers? Or is this all totally uninteresting to you? Are we all following the ass instead of the dog?

Excalibur Electronics were absolute masters of misdirection, I know I have all their computers  In the end it bit them in the ass, people got tired of buying them.

Ps. Did you even notice the dog driving the car in the photo?

Viele Gruesse,

Nick