Friday, April 14, 2006

A hidden function

Sitting here in a comfortable sofa, with the Matterhorn visible through the window, I remember that many years ago I once read in a computer magazine that you could press a wild combination of keys in Excel, and you would get a flight simulator. I tried, and indeed, there was a simple flight simulator where you would fly past something like a mountain where the names of the developers of Excel (a lot of people!) were displayed. Weird stuff! CheckerBoard also has a hidden feature: the engine match. When I want to test a change in Cake, I run a match of 288 games against KingsRow to verify that I have really improved something. Of course, this is all automated, and you can run such a match too: Ctrl+Shift+M starts a match - you can figure out the rest for yourself - I have to go back to staring at Switzerland's most beautiful mountain...

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