Single Comment

Well, ICC ratings are highly inflated. Even micro-Max was at 2160 in no time, and I think top players there are around 3600. And believe me, they are not Kasparov. So subtracting 1000 seems prudent... In blitz (5 sec/move is blitz!) computers have a big advantage over Humans, as Humans tend to overlook quite some low-depth tactics at those speeds. (This can be as blunt as simply hanging a piece.) Computers do not have that weakness, and mercilessly exploit it. Tord Romstad once tried to make his program (Glaurung) to simulate a weak Human player. To that end he completely crippled it, by randomly deleting a large fraction of the moves, hanging pieces here and there, to the point where it was scoring 0% against other weak programs. It was still above 2000 on ICC in no time. People did simply fail to collect the hanging pieces, or waited with doing it until they were facing a mate-in-one threat elsewhere on the board... It is true that there are some complications, but Joker (rated slightly below 2400 on the CCRL list) switches from Qxd4 to O-O after 2.18 sec (and that is on a 1.3Ghz machine, not 3GHz!). But at a much later stage the piece can still be saved at the expense of a Pawn by playing g4 (Nxg4 Qc3!) The absolute value of ratings is arbitrary, and thus hardly worth a debate. But the heart of the matter is that in terms of playing strength, according to the best information I have Zillions < ChessV < Fairy-Max << Joker << Crafty << Rybka I happen to roughly attach the labels 1600, 1800, 2000, 2400, 2800, 3200 to this, to conform to the CCRL scale. If you think Zillions belongs at another position in this ranking, I would be interested to see some evidense of it.