Single Comment

Please let me explain another way ...

The purpose of SMIRF is to fairly play ALL 960 FRC starting positions and
ALL 12,118 CRC starting positions equally and extraordinarily well.

Obviously, it would be impossible to generate high-quality opening books
of adequate depth and width for all of these 1000's of games within a
survivable time.  So, to attempt such a project is not even being
realistically considered.

Moreover, some people are skeptical that any of the starting positions
with FRC pieces upon the 8x8 board or CRC pieces upon the 10x8 board are
at all or significantly superior compared to other unknown permutations. 
In other words, they do not consider Chess any better than the other 959
FRC variants nor do they consider any of the 2 dozen CRC variants given
names by their inventors any better than the other 12,000+ CRC variants.

[Personally, I think otherwise that Chess & Opti Chess are the best FRC &
CRC games, respectively.  In the latter case, I admittedly lack
impersonal objectivity.]

In my playtesting experience, SMIRF is vastly better than merely 'an
impractical experiment that plays Chess poorly' as you describe it (more
or less).  You are missing the point.

You obviously do not fully understand that there is a strong correlation
between the quality of moves generated by a pure search intelligence
program (such as SMIRF) and the time, plies or positions that must be
invested to achieve worthwhile results.  When testing one program against
another or testing one set of material values for pieces against another
using the same program, I NEVER use a time per move of less than 1 hour
... running a dual-CPU (2.4 Ghz per CPU) server.  I regard
quickly-obtained results as random, too replete with bad moves and
analytically uninteresting (since a sub-genius such as I could have won
the game playing either side).  Given reasonable conditions, SMIRF &
ChessV make moves well beyond my capacity as a player.  By comparison,
the Zillions Of Games program makes bad moves even when given 24 hours per
move or more.