Author: Fabien Letouzey
Date: 13:40:08 09/11/02
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On September 11, 2002 at 15:06:15, Dann Corbit wrote: >Concerning this: >"Chessy is a chess player. It is not very strong for a program, but has got an >original way of playing (pawn oriented)." > >I have some questions. > >When you say that the program is pawn oriented, do you mean that you spend a >great deal of energy calculating pawn structures or some other meaning? I knew I should have removed that part of the page long ago :) Although you can safely forget everything about Chessy, I owe you some explanation (perhaps you collect information about all chess programs, no matter how weak). The statement on my web page referred to an old program that I never really finished (it has at least one evaluation bug, which makes my comment even more realistic ;) ). It is true that I intended to focus mainly on the pawn structure not because I thought this was the best thing to do, but because I did not want to create yet another tactical program (I believed that most programs were king-attack based). That beeing said, I knew very little about the existing chess programs. Because of the pawn hash tables any pawn-only computation is virtually free, so my current bet is that any program nowadays (not only the top ones) knows a lot more about pawns that I could possibly imagine at that time :) >What are your future plans for Chessy? Ok, you really seem to be interested in any chess program so I have to explain. I mostly write Othello programs (I have just released one for Palm computers). In order to learn new things about game programming (for instance see which heuristics are game-dependent and which are not, study the impact of BF, ...), I tried a bit of draughts and chess. However, I will forever be unable to write a strong chess program because I have a very strong aversion to eval tuning (I get bored after 2 parameters). This is not a problem in Othello because machine learning is more efficient than manual tuning there, so I can focus on algorithms and implementation; most of the tuning is statistic-based. Now it sounds like my chess experiments were really negative, but this is not the case; I did learn exactly what I was looking for. A funny example is that at the very beginning of Chessy development, I was easily able to find a PV bug which I also had in all my other programs. This gave me a better insight and indirectly led to the top post of this thread :) Again it looks like I am wandering aimlessly and am not answering your question. To me chess programming was just a "lab" for experiments about search algorithms. You can compare this with AliBaba if you want. It is no serious program at all, understanding is what I seek. Maybe one day I will find somebody interested in eval tuning, and then Chessy could have a future again (but that would include a full re-write anyway). >I notice that you have an Xboard version of Chessy. Do you also have a Winboard >version (Win32 port)? No sorry, I do not use Windows. Fabien.
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