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H. G. Muller wrote on Tue, Jun 17, 2008 05:27 PM UTC:

Well, never mind. The symmetrical playtesting would not have given any
conclusive results with anything less than 2000 games anyway.

The asymmetrical playtesting sounds more interesting. I am not completely
sure what Smirf bug you are talking about, but in the Battle of the Goths
Championship it happened that Smirf played a totally random move when it
could give mate in 3 (IIRC) according to both programs (Fairy-Max was the
lucky opponent). This move blundered away the Queen with which Smirf was
supposed to mate, after which Fairy-Max had no trouble winning with an
Archbishop agains some five Pawns. 

This seems to happen when Smirf has seen the mate, and stored the tree
leading to it completely in its hash table. It is then no longer
searching, and it reports score and depth zero, playing the stored moves
(at least, that was the intention).

I have never seen any such behavior when Smirf was reporting non-zero
search depth, and in particular, the last non-zero-depth score before such
an occurence (a mate score) seemed to be correct. So I don't think there
is much chance of an error when you believe the mate announce,emt and call
the game.

Of course you could also use Joker80 or TJchess10x8, which do not suffer
from such problems.