People understand zilch about computerchess games.

There are people in the computerchess scene who run automated matches and watch only the result !
They are not interested in the “chess” thing.
It could be whatever game or moves.
They are interested in statistics.
They calculate the ELO and are happy to install only the strongest engine.

Also server freaks who are mainly interested in winning the game by using cooked books or massive hardware to compete the others.

At least these guys watch the game.

I am mostly irritated by the amount of new strong engines in CCC.

There come new versions and I ask the programmer how strong and they say: 2700, 3000, 3400 elo.

Nobody has 1800 or 2100 or 2500.

It’s shocking.

And when I see these engines they mainly play all the same.

In opposite to this LC0 has it all different.
It’s a game changer. A paradigm change.

LC0 plays chess from another planet.

It can win against the strongest AB programs although it is tactically not that strong like these AB programs.

This is magic

Hi Thorsten,

no person in this World can work without statistics if chess programs are several hundreds elo stronger as best player in the World. The secret ist to use the statistics for all this what is interesting for us.

Nobody watch only the results. We are working with the results. That's an important different.

I gave an example:
Wasp on DGT-Pi ... I wrote today.

Nothing is shocking, it's shocking in your brain because you don't understand it. Lc0 plays not chess from an other planet, Lc0 plays computer chess, typical for the time we life. That's complete nonsens what you wrote, fanboy like, not more not less.

I wrote this so many years.
The secret today isn't to make the programs stronger, the secret is to make the programs weaker. John like that, found the old Excellence and plays many games Wasp vs. Excellence and try to find a solution that Wasp can play on the same level.

3250 Elo for Wasp ... and I am happy if Wasp hold the style.
Because 3250 Elo = maximal 2.850 Elo on 300Mhz systems. 2850 Elo is the max. strength from best human. So if we have a chess computer a program can play human style from 1.500 - 2850 real Elo on 300Mhz I am very happy because for self playing absolutely great.

Only one example!

Do not start such discussion because the opinion is nonsens!
We can developed with strongest chess programs all what we like to see because we are able to simulate a style, we are able to simulate a high performance on lesser Mhz systems. We are able to do all what we like to do. That's a perfectly situation for all future developments.

With Wasp or with Lc0.

Thorsten, I am looking so many years in playing styles of engines. My opinion to Lc0 is split-up. I am thinking we have great works by chess programmes with much more power as self optimated programs. The KI idea I like a lot but only if we are able to used it. If programmers used that what KI can give us. Absolute and clean KI for computer chess alone is a very bad siutation. I am thinking that you are a persons you like computer chess and you should not hold the flag for such KI developments. That is opposition and others are thinking you are not able to build a clear opinion, comparable with all this you told us in the past.

Best
Frank

Chris Whittington wrote:

Brendan wrote:

matejst wrote:

The last engine I fully understood was Zarkov 6.55. It played reasonably well positionally, and it did not calculate too deep, so the way it treated most of the positions I was interested in "made sense" for me. And I could also check some of the lines.

In the cases when Zarkov was lost in closed positions of the French, or Slav, I could use Gandalf, or ProDeo, and recently I found Winter. I feel I can understand the variations I see on the screen because the evals were written differently, by humans, without using "texel tunning", "sigmoid coherence functions" (kidding) etc.



An example: I liked Zarkov and Wasp 1.02, but with each newer version Wasp was pruning more and more, being faster and faster, and John Stanback adopted the new approaches, and it just lost any sense for me.

But the baseline is that I see engines and computerchess as just a mean to play and enjoy chess. I am not interested in engine tournaments, in TCEC, rating lists, etc.

To finish, something I thought about lately: I agree more and more with Alexander Naumov who believed that open source had its drawbacks. That's of course not the he formulated it, but... Every week we hear about a clone or suspected clone, but the truth seems to be, from my perspective, that the SF team monopolized the rights to originality. I'll try to explain: while they can incorporate every single idea (they're good enough not to use code, and they have a code base) they find in other open source engines without problems, any new programmer has to open his code, and share his ideas, simply to avoid being accused of cloning. It just has killed originality, on one hand, and usability, on the other. But enough about it.

I feel like Boban made some very good points here.

I always liked the analysis of Prodeo 1.2-1.7 and thought the moves made sense.

Same with Wasp 1.02, Frenzee 3.5.19 and other old engines...even WChess 1.06 despite being only 2330 or so.

I seem to remember years ago Boban tweaked Zarkov 6.55 a little to make it more Karpov-like which was cool.

For "sample mining" (my term, which means to have engines play tournaments *only* with the lines/tabiyas from my repertoire and thus, learn how to play it well, new plans, motifs etc) I also liked Thinker, various Rodent personalities and other "non-mainstream" engines.

With regard to open-source, yeah, I think this phenomenon is kinda weird.

How many other software industries is it the *norm* to open up your source code for all to view and plunder from?

Especially for competitive programmers.

How can a single programmer hope to compete with the TEAM of talented guys working on Stockfish, if this TEAM can *also* plunder ideas from his code?

For example, obviously, the Ethereal programmer is enormously talented, but personally, I think he should never have opened his code in the first place.

He is good enough to make something completely unique and keep the source a secret.

The same as Chris W, who recently wrote CoronaVirusChess - a clearly very strong engine.

40 years of experience wasn't enough for some idiots who still started accusing Chris, simply because he keeps the source closed (as he should).

Lance Perkins, author of Thinker was a guy who hid the PV of his (closed source) engine and drew the attention of the witchhunt crowd.

Even though he explained why he does already - to make Thinker more of a human-like opponent:

The question was: Hi folks. I'm sorry if this has been discussed already - I'm new here. The question is, are there engines which aim to play in a human-like way? If so, what ideas exist for achieving it?

Lance answered:

Quote :

1. Most humans don't play at the level of GMs. The GMs are not a representation of the majority of humans. In that sense, GMs are like computers - they don't play like humans.

2. Humans don't give out PVs while they are thinking.

3. Humans make blunders.

4. Humans are inconsistent. They get affected by all sorts of distractions, like sickness, fatigue, excitement, etc., and they end-up playing worse or better.

5. Humans converse when they play.

6. Humans are not capable of 10 moves in 1 second.

7. Humans understand closed/drawn positions. But computers play on forever.

8. Humans don't play from a copy of some endgame database. They won't give out a Queen just to get to a position that is in the endgame database.

9. Humans don't play from an opening book. They have memorized opening sequences. But is does not accomodate for a huge number of 100-ply sequences. It also cannot be swapped out at will (e.g., small book vs large book).

10. Humans don't play with fixed amount of time for each move. In contrast, when you tell an engine that the game is 40 moves in 40 minutes, it will make moves at around 1 minute each. Some move may be either too quick (easy moves) or a fixed multiple (e.g., always 3 minutes).

Having said all those, I think that ChessMaster is the closest to how humans play. It can be configured to play a whole range of styles and preferences.

In the Thinker/ThinkerBoard that plays at FICS, I also have made attempts to address some items I have listed.

(1) The engine runs on a pocket PC.
(2) Just no pv.
(3) There is a mode in Thinker, where, occasionally, the second best move is used.
(4) Different settings are used depending on the hour of the day. Best settings are used in the morning. Worse settings are used at night.
(5) Players can converse with ThinkerTalk.
(6) The engine's minimum move time is 1 second. If it is done searching for less than 1 second, it will sleep for a randmon amount of time (between 1 to 2 seconds).
(7) {no working solution yet}
( Just no eg bb/tb.
(9) Just no opening book.
(10) There is a mode in Thinker, where, the time allocation is randomized.

http://www.talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?t=20957


The "how could someone create something so strong without cloning?" accusations would come regardless of whether he was guilty or not.

This is how the CC community is.

Hi Brendon,

Yes, I decided not just to keep the source closed but also the executable. No part of Bella-Ciao (CoronaVirusChess) has ever left my office, and never will. I refuse to give the multiple number of malignant talkchess trolls even the tiniest bit for de-compiling, reverse engineering, to hang their accusations and witch hunts on. Only thing that gets out are games it plays online (which is quite enough testing for me) and any games I find worthy of publishing. And yes, it is a Tal engine, it’s good at manoeuvring itself into king attacks as several of the last few games in the Rapid Championship showed.

The same thinking is prevailing with the developer of CyberNezh and SultanKhan2.0, keeping them private. At least Nezh has been available for sparring as a lichess bot.

https://lichess.org/@/Nezh-BOT