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Subject: Re: Dutch Open impressions

Author: Tony Werten

Date: 23:53:01 10/29/01

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On October 29, 2001 at 11:54:18, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On October 29, 2001 at 10:43:35, Tony Werten wrote:
>
>>On October 29, 2001 at 10:29:26, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On October 29, 2001 at 04:05:08, Tony Werten wrote:
>>>
>>>>On October 28, 2001 at 21:06:11, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>On October 28, 2001 at 18:20:43, Bas Hamstra wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>Again many bizar events. While discussing how boring and anti-positional Tiger
>>>>>>usually plays, with Jeroen Noomen, during the game Tao-CT, CT shot a h-pawn
>>>>>>through Tao's left eye. End of discussion. Well, let's call the thing an
>>>>>>idiot-savant, that's as far as I can go. Newcomer is EEC that does not use any
>>>>>>form of AlphaBeta at all. The author tried to explain the concept to me, but I'm
>>>>>>not sure I understand. Each move it plays a couple of shallow "matches" against
>>>>>>itsself and some kind of pattern matching is involved. Eventually that leads to
>>>>>>"votes" for different moves. The author says it has won some Blitz games against
>>>>>>GNU.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Also new is "Gadget" from Hans Zijdenbos, written in Basic. Since it is brand
>>>>>>new, it has many things *not*. It has no hashtable, no pondering, no nullmove
>>>>>>and believe it or not, no quiescence search. Very little evaluation. Now can
>>>>>>that play chess? Amazingly, it does. Imagine Gadget searching 6-7 ply and Tao
>>>>>>12-13 ply, basically twice as deep. Yet it kept Tao negative for over twenty
>>>>>>moves, with sound play. Cock de Gorter said the same happened during
>>>>>>Crafty-Gadget. You would almost expect non nullmovers find positional holes in
>>>>>>the  nullmove search or something.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>During a deep technical discussion with Johan de Koning whether to analyze mates
>>>>>>and countermates in the evaluation function or not, Jeroen Noomen drops by:
>>>>>>"aha, a rabbit". Apparently an enemy knight at h7, that can't move, is a rabbit.
>>>>>>We didn't get it, what do rabbits usually do? We could think of two things: a)
>>>>>>multiply and b) disappear in a hole. Since there were no minor promotions
>>>>>>possible in the foreseeable future and the rabbit finally disappeared in h7 I
>>>>>>wouldn't be surprised if b) has something to do with it.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Well, Tao scored 3 out of 6 so far, on a PIII-500. Should have won against Ant,
>>>>>>which was positionally manoevred into a corner quite nicely, but alas, fell into
>>>>>>the "impotent pair" trap which I have no code for: bishop+unpromotable pawn, and
>>>>>>it became a draw.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Finally: what's the matter with Crafty? It has the fastest hardware of all, but
>>>>>>seems to do relatively poorly, what's the matter? The new SE stuff, or what?
>>>>>>
>>>>>>TooTheLoo,
>>>>>>Bas.
>>>>>
>>>>>1.  Does Crafty _really_ have the fastest hardware there?  That's hard to
>>>>>believe with lots of 1.4 gig Dual AMD machines cheaply available.  But in any
>>>>>case, it is possible.  A dual 1.4 is faster than a quad-700 for Crafty, however,
>>>>>as the quad loses a bit more to overhead...
>>>>
>>>>Crafty doesn't have the fastest hardware but it's still quite fast. In the
>>>>endgame Crafty - XiniX I was outsearching Crafty several times by 3 to 5 ply on
>>>>a celeron 700 ! Unfortunately it wasn't enough to win, but it does seem to
>>>>indicate something is wrong in Crafty's endgame. XiniX had no problem searching
>>>>the same depth.
>>>>
>>>>Tony
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>I don't think the bug shows up like that.  If there is a bug at all.  Are you
>>>using the 3-4-5 piece EGTBs?  That definitely affects the search speed.
>>>Otherwise, no ideas here...
>>
>>Yes. I probe 3-4-5 tables from disk in the search (not in quiescence ) XiniX was
>>not faster than Crafty in nps (but 4 times slower). In the positions the
>>branchingfactor is so small that 20 plies should not be a problem.
>>
>>Tony
>
>
>
>Can you post the position (or if you already have, indicate where) and I will
>look.  One easy explanation is that if you see a score of (say) 3.00, while
>Crafty is saying 0.00, then the two programs are searching trees of vastly
>different 'shapes'.  IE you can prune every 0.00 type branch while Crafty
>can't.

Don't have the possibility to check now. IIRC there were 2 positions were Crafty
said 0.00 that are doubtfull.

The first one is when Crafty exchanged it's rook for a bishop (on g2?) and a
pawn.

Second (this is the one were the big search differences came ) is right before
or after Crafty exchanged it's bishop for a knight (on c3?) and gave up on the
bishoppair. The zero score might be correct here, but I don't think an engine
should be able to see it.

Tony

>
>This is often the reason for dramatically different search depths,  when one
>program has an evaluation closer to the truth than the other.  Or at least
>when one program has an evaluation that greatly enhances the pruning while
>the other has an evaluation that is forcing it to consider lots of lines
>that are not needed.
>
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>>2.  Crafty may well have a serious bug.  Michel has reported that it will crash
>>>>>on a deep think, which is odd.  There is no SE code in it, but it is possible
>>>>>that something in recent versions has left a bad array subscript or something.
>>>>>I am trying to get it to repeat a crash, but so far, nothing...
>>>>>
>>>>> y



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