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Subject: Re: Fruit: first observations. Not a coconut yet, a budding pomegranate

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 02:56:40 03/11/04

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On March 11, 2004 at 05:21:03, Fabien Letouzey wrote:

>
>On March 10, 2004 at 22:39:48, Djordje Vidanovic wrote:
>
>>Fruit is a very nice new program that can be freely downloaded from Dann
>>Corbit's ftp site.  It is a UCI engine and can run either under Arena or the CB
>>GUI.  I tried it in a very short match (played at quick blitz controls) against
>>one of the older Crafties (18.12) and it did not have much of a real chance to
>>score.  It does seem to be very promising though as it had a couple of playable
>>and perhaps winnable positions, but due to the apparent lack of knowledge it
>>lost even these games.  I think that game 4 could be very telling for the
>>programmer who said that he was a little disappointed with CCC.  Ahem, he should
>>know that all things that matter in life usually take time, and CCC is just like
>>that especially at the beginning. He will surely be overwhelmed eventually with
>>the amount of feedback by CCC members.
>
>Fruit is of course not in the same league as Crafty.
>
>The lack of knowledge is real, not apparent :)))

The lack of knowledge in crafty is also real.
Crafty does not know things like ETC.

>I am well aware of it, and no I don't intend to leave it that way forever.
>
>About CCC sure, time will tell.  I am a bit stressed because of the imminent
>release so I was not too happy not to find mcuh help when I needed it.  Next
>week after version 1.0 is out, things will be more quiet.
>
>>Anyway, I used the CB GUI as the "arena" (pun intended) (wishing to find out if
>>Fruit would run there; it did, splendidly so).  Both programs used Powerbook
>>2003 as the opening database; hash was set at 64MB, the machine an AMD Athlon
>>2800+ (Tbred, 2250Mhz). Krafty is still a very tough nut to crack (too much
>>speed and too much knowledge in Krafty;  Crafty was hitting about 1.2-1.4
>>million nps in the middle game while Fruit reached ca. 750-800,000nps.  The
>>higher nps you can see in the game scores for Fruit are due to tablebase access
>>slowdown for Crafty; Fruit still has no tablebase access). The first four games
>>should be enough to get an idea about the strengths and weaknesses of the
>>newcomer, the match was a bit longer, but I won't bother you with all the
>>details.
>
>Yes Fruit is not only stupid, but slow as well.  It takes a lot of time to
>compute very little.  With the eval features as they are, it should be twice as
>fast.  I don't optimise that because I intend to change the eval a lot anyway
>(but not for version 1.0).

I do not think that it is slow and it is simply crafty that is fast.
There are a lot of programs that search significantly less nodes per second.

>
>Also Fruit is designed for longer time controls; maybe it gets crushed a little
>less in say 20 0?
>
>Fabien.

People often claim that small evaluation should be a problem at slower time
control so if it has little evaluation it cannot do better at longer time
control.

What is your opinion about it?
Is it a wrong opinion and chess is simply a search based game when almost every
hole in the evaluation can be covered by searching few plies deeper?

I knew from the results of olithink that programs can do well even with small
evaluation but the results of your program suggest that olithink was not close
to the best that it is possible to do with small evaluation and I suspect that
it is even possible to be better than Crafty with your little evaluation(after
all I guess that you do not use all the good techniques that were mentioned and
for example you do not use history based pruning when the idea is to prune moves
that almost always failed low based on the history tables by searching them to
reduced depth,not to mention that you do not use pruning based on evaluation or
extensions except check extensions).

Uri



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