Author: James Robertson
Date: 14:59:45 01/16/99
Go up one level in this thread
On January 15, 1999 at 19:46:47, Dan Homan wrote:
>On January 15, 1999 at 16:10:53, James Robertson wrote:
>
>>On January 15, 1999 at 13:43:40, Dann Corbit wrote:
>>
>>>GNUChess is a *pansy*.
>>>Try it against a real program.
>>>A 3 or better score in a ten game match against commercial programs or crafty
>>>would be impressive.
>>
>>I resent that. My program has a score of 0.0 in about 20 games with Gnuchess.
>>
>>James
>
>Hi James,
>
>I remember my program losing to a RadioShack 1650L repeatedly early
>on. The thing had the cpu power of a toaster and it was 6 months before my
>program running on a 486 could beat it on level 1.
>
>Gnuchess can certainly seems like a monster at first. I started my program
>in the fall of 1996 and it was a full year before EXchess could even play
>a reasonable looking game with GNUchess. No wins or draws at that point,
>but at least it played what looked like a reasonable game occasionally.
>Soon after that (and a re-write to undo some of the handicapping mistakes
>I had made early on) my program became increasingly more competitive
>with GNU. The most recent version scores slightly better than 50% against
>it in my informal testing.
That's cool. I'm scared to test my program against EXchess, as it would ruin my
self-esteem. :)
>
>The biggest thing to remember in competiting with GNU chess is that it has
>pretty solid code (meaning few if any bugs) with a pretty well tuned eval.
>When I was first competing with it, I thought "there must be some big search
>trick or eval trick that I am missing.... Why can't I compete?" The major
>reason was nothing flashy... rather it was bugs that were beating me. Bugs
>in my search and bugs in my eval.
My program is simple enough there aren't too many bugs. Of course, they always
show up when you are confident they aren't there. :) Right now, mostly it needs
a better eval, and some standard search stuff like null move.
>I went on a lengthy campaign of bug
>detection/squishing. By far, squishing bugs provides the largest ELO
>return on time spent.
>
> - Dan
Here is an entertaining game between GNUchess and my program:
[Event "Computer chess game"]
[Date "1999.01.16"]
[White "JR's CP"]
[Black "GNUChess"]
[Result "0-1"]
[TimeControl "40/300"]
1. d4 f5 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. Bf4 Bb4 5. e3 Ne4 6. Qb3 Nc6 7. f3 Nxc3 8.
bxc3 Be7 9. d5 Na5 10. Qa4 b6 11. dxe6 O-O 12. exd7 Bxd7 13. Qc2 Be6 14.
Rd1 Qc8 15. Qa4 Bf6 16. Rc1 g6 17. c5 Rd8 18. e4 fxe4 19. fxe4 Be7 20. c6
Rf8 21. Bh6 Rxf1+ 22. Kxf1 Bc4+ 23. Kf2 Qg4 24. Nf3 Bc5+ 25. Be3 Bxe3+ 26.
Kxe3 Qxg2 27. Qc2 Qh3 28. Kf2 Rf8 29. Qd1 Nxc6 30. a3 Ne5 31. Rb1 Rxf3+ 32.
Ke1 Rf1+ 33. Rxf1 Qe3+ 34. Qe2 Qxe2#
{Black mates} 0-1
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