HIARCS 15 GUI & CHESS ENGINE....!

I am extremely Pleased to Make This Announcement.....Hiarcs 15 Has a Set Release Date Of 12-30-21 !!
Return Of Hiarcs to Top Level Chess? "A Very Exciting Development Indeed!!          

(TalkChess) by BrendanJNorman » Fri Dec 17, 2021 11:27 am

mvanthoor wrote: ↑Thu Dec 16, 2021 12:06 am

Werewolf wrote: ↑Wed Dec 15, 2021 7:15 pm
HIARCS 15 looks like end of this week / early next week
After almost 10 years? That'd better make a splash with a +500-600 improvement or nobody will pay any attention to it.
I disagree. As long as it is the REAL Hiarcs (not like "Fritz" which has had 20 authors since the legendary Frans Morsch) and retains its nice positional playing style, I will buy it in an instant.

I'm sure a lot of old-school computer chess fellas fall into the same boat as me.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.


Mark Uniacke (Hiarcs Forum):

"We have reached RC1 which is with testers now.
We have worked constantly at this for a long time now with very little sleep and HCE Pro itself is ready.
However, I have to consider next week is my wedding anniversary and our first Christmas with our new grand daughter. Personally the thought of releasing the day of my wedding anniversary and doing support over Christmas instead of being with my family does not fill me with joy.
Added to that I think both Michal and I are exhausted at the moment and it would be worthwhile enjoying a few days at Christmas unburdened by tiredness.
Therefore I have decided to reschedule the release date to 30th Dec. I am sorry if this disappoints you, but I think the product will be worth the very short wait now."

(Mention, that it is not clear (to me), that a new, stronger Hiarcs engine will be included in the HCE Pro ?!? Perhaps, it is a new GUI-version, only)


"For me this is the Hiarcs Chess Explorer and not a Hiarcs 15 uci engine."

"I like the GUI Chess Explorer, I am customer with number 003 (number is part of the Hiarcs 1.4 Disk).

Engine is playing interesting chess, all the time.
Must not be in TOP-50 in the World, the human-like-style is much more important and the last version produced over 2825 on a modern PC with 1 Core. How many chess player are stronger?"

30th December is ok with me. Its my birthday. So at least i get one gift ;-)

After reading about the GUI improvements, I plan to buy the new HIARCS (I will wait to see the new Shredder though; I am just much more used to its GUI). I think that the engine will be excellent too. There seems to be a direct correlation between the HCE evaluation and the NNs trained from them (the better the HCE, the better the net; and then, there is absolutely no reason for Mark Uniacke not to use also Lc0 data, e.g.) and just by adding a net Mark can improve his engine several hundreds Elos. And since he has waited so long, it has to be for a reason. I expect HIARCS to be quite strong.

I see that on Talkchess most posters underestimate Mark's Uniacke abilities. I have no doubts that he can make an engine ranked among the top 5, perhaps 3, especially now when it is mostly a engineering problem, but I guess (I probably am biased) he would rather try to create a product oriented toward a broader market, and, at the same time, to preserve HIARCS style.

matejst wrote:

There seems to be a direct correlation between the HCE evaluation and the NNs trained from them (the better the HCE, the better the net...

This implies an iterative process of improvement:

1. train a net
2. train a net from the resulting net
3. Go to step 1