Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 11:48:27 09/19/99
Go up one level in this thread
On September 19, 1999 at 00:13:38, Michael OLear wrote:
>Has anyone evaluated the strength of any of the chess programs out for the Palm
>Pilot or CE?
>
>- mike o.
I have a Palm Pilot IIIx and downloaded PocketChess 1.1 by Scott Ludwig. A WinCE
version of this program also exists, but I have no WinCE computer to try it.
I played a number of games on my PalmIIIx against Chess Tiger 11.99 running on a
386sx 20MHz notebook.
PocketChess lost almost every game.
After that I downloaded a program named "AfterBurner 2.2", which is able to
overclock the Palm IIIx / Palm V.
Now my Palm runs at 26MHz without any wait state. It is 2.6 times faster than
the standard Palm! It looks like any PalmIIIx/PalmV can be overclocked this way!
BTW the processor in the Palm is compatible with the 68000 (the processor of the
first Macintosh), but is faster at the same clock speed and has a very low power
consumption. If you have written programs for the 68000, writting for the Palm
should be easy!
PocketChess on the faster Palm was able to draw a little bit more often, but is
still losing badly to Tiger. It looks like to get the same strength I have to
give PocketChess on the overclocked Palm at least 4 times the time I give to
Tiger. I admit I have not spend a lot of time trying to verify this.
I had set Tiger to use only 16Kb hash table. I think PocketChess does not use
hash tables.
The speeds of the computers used are:
386sx20 3.8 MIPS
PalmIIIx (68000EZ 16MHz) 2.7 MIPS
Overclocked PalmIIIx (26MHz no WS) 7.0 MIPS (close to a 386-30MHz)
Of course the figures above are approximations. And hard to know what the
program are able to get out of the processors (well... at least I know that for
Tiger the 386sx is a very bad choice).
I estimate (from a lot of games played against rated HUMANS) that Tiger on this
computer is between 1900-2100 ELO.
So I would say that PocketChess is probably in the 1660-1860 ELO range on the
standard Palm, maybe 1760-1960 on an overclocked Palm. This is not much, but is
enough for the average player and it can give you a lot of fun. And at least you
know that it is POSSIBLE to beat it.
I want to add that this is no critisism against PocketChess and Scott Ludwig. I
was really pleased to discover that such a program existed. The size of
PocketChess 1.1 is 29Kb, and it has a nice interface. Simple but nice. The
program looks reliable (never had a crash). Writting such a program for the Palm
is a great achievement I would say. PocketChess has even a little built-in
opening book, and makes good use of it!
All my congratulations to Scott. If you have a Palm or a WinCE handheld, I would
recommend downloading this shareware program ($15). The internet address given
in the "About" dialog of the program is:
http://www.eskimo.com/~scottlu
Don't forget also to download AfterBurner (on PalmIIIx/PalmV) to get a lot more
MIPS from your favorite handheld (your battery life will not be significantly
affected, and there is ABSOLUTELY NO RISK for the computer anyway).
Christophe
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