Author: Don Dailey
Date: 14:54:24 04/26/98
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>And >now, returning to our first concern here, I would ike to ask you whether >you are engaged or not in some commercial effor in chess computers. I >rememnber now that I touched something of this with you time ago with >respect to Cilkchess and I believe to to remember that you mentioned >some chance to produce a commercial version of it, but maybe I am >completely mistaken. In the past you worked with larry in a some very >nice proyects. I have and I still play Kasparov gambit -patched version- >that certainly should have deserved a lot more credit that he received. >I have also Socrates. Nothing of the sort for the moment, with or >without Larry? >Cheers >Fernando Hi Fernando, Currently there is no plan for commercial products unless I do it with MIT which is not likely. However I am putting together a free parallel program. It will be very simple (along the lines of the simple public domain chess program currently available) but much better. I don't expect it to be competitive with Crafty or any of the current popular programs. If I'm lucky it'll be approximately as strong as GNU chess but that remains to be seen. I will not spend more than about 3 days on it so it certainly will not be fine tuned but will have all the standard stuff, hash tables, selectivity etc. The evaluation will be piece square table based and will be very primitive. I may add some dynamic evaluation if I can get to it quickly. Stuff like square of the pawn probable won't make it in though unfortunately. This will serve as a nice example of a parallel program and also show off our great language Cilk. To run it parallel, it will be much better to have a multiprocessor machine although one is not required. Of course it runs slower if you specify more processors than the machine actually has. Right now only Unix is supported for Cilk but the program will compile on any serial machine (as a serial program) if you have a standard ansi C compiler. But I can compile a version for any one who is interested. Here are the cilk platforms you can run on, they all must have Unix: 1) Dec Alpha's, 2) Intel pentiums 3) SGI machines 4) Sparc SMP's There is a version of Cilk for networks too but it's still under development and is not quite ready for chess. By the way, we intend to port Cilk to Windows NT also. I do not know what the timetable is though, but probably pretty soon. I would like to set up a nice serial version for windows with a graphical interface if anyone shows any real interest. Does anyone know what is involved with kludging Xboard (the windows version) to work? I've done it on Unix but have no experience at all with Windows except for some minor system administration at the lab. Are there other user interfaces generally available (with protocol documentation?) If I get any feedback on the thing, I'll improve it regularly but I don't think it'll ever be in Cilkchess's league. Most of you guy's probably won't find the program very interesting. You mentioned Kasparov's Gambit. Here is what I know about this program: The base program is the one that won the 1993 International Computer Chess Championship. However the program is not nearly of the same strength for a variety of reasons. I was not at all involved in the design or programming of the interface or the integration of it into the final product, but the final product was more than 2X slower. Me and Larry Kaufman checked it out on equal computers and also compared moves at the same depth. My programs are always determistic (or at least have deterministic settings) and at the same depth the final program did not always play the same move or return the same score. Something changed in the translation of it to the final product. Some of the chess specific code must have been modified. Part of the speed difference was that it was converted to run on a 16 bit compiler instead of the 32 bit one I developed and ran with at the ICCC. Probably the interface sucked away some cpu overhead too, perhaps polling for I/O or something. I was kind of disappointed as I was really proud of this program and it was my first program that scored decently against the Genius program. It was also the first program I "stuck with", i.e. it was finished many months before the tournament and me and Larry spent a lot of time tunning and refining it. Corel chess is mine too, unless they bought another program. I did a program for them in a big hurry from scratch. It's the weakest one I ever wrote and I was surprised to see it in some tournament posted here on this newsgroup. I was surprised because it was NOT in last place! They did not require a strong program and the ones I had belonged to other people so I was forced to write one from scratch again. - Don
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