Matej Guid (2005) . Prešeren awards for students.

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Abstract

Estimates about who was the strongest World Chess Champion of all times , are based primarily on the analyses of their games done by chess grandmasters and these are often subjective. The emergance of better and better chess programs, which can nowadazs already cope with the best chess players in the worls and even surpass them in certain elements, help gaining more objective answers to this question. Regardless of that, in past researches computers were mainly used for processing statistical data of the chess games' results. I had a different approach at evaluating World Chess Champions; I was mainly interested in the quality of their game, which I was evaluating with the help of computer analysis of individual moves. For this purpose I used a computer chess program, Crafty, which is renowned for being the most powerful open source chess program in the world. I altered the program so that it would not have a time limit at evaluating indvidual moves and set a maximum fixed depth of processing the search tree. By doing so, I enabled it to function on any compueter regardless of its speed, without that having to influence the results, while at the same time forcing it to dedicate more time to more difficult positions. I compared the Wold Champions based on different criteria, such as deviations of played moves versus the moves chosen by a computer , estimating errors and blunders, and the percantage of played out best moves. In addition to evaluating played moves, I also estimated the difficulty of positions with which the plazers were faced, and deviations of best two suggested moves in them. Based on these estimates I was ascertaining the expected game quality of World Champions under balanced conditions, which represents an attempt to bring the champions to a common denominator while evaluating regardless of their different game styles.l The results of the analyses also provided me with an overview of ups and downs of game quality in the player' careers and ascertaining their form in indvidual duels. I proved Crafty's credability as an evaluator as well as the correctness of the used working methods, by finding the players' errors coincided with actual game results and by confirming the dependence of errors on the complexity of the positions. So who was the best world Champion of all times? The winner according to the main criteria, where we measured average deviations between evaluations of played moves and best evaluated moves according to the computer, is Jose Raul Capablanca, who was the World champion during 1921 and 1927. He was also on top according to all other criteria, where we measured game quality, and was only beaten in one criterion, agme quality in different game styles, by the youngest World Champion, Vladimir Kramnik. Both of them distinctly deviated from the rest.

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