Author: Edward Seid
Date: 05:33:41 11/21/02
----- cross-posted on Winboard Forum ----- Perhaps the Subject is a bit over-enthusiastic. Let me explain. I've been thinking about FischerRandom lately. There are 960 possible starting positions. If you turn off the opening book, and let your favorite engine ponder the normal opening position, the evaluation will probably stay within +/- 0.25 (maybe even a smaller range). In other words, things are about equal. Have you ever wondered what the results would be if you let Crafty or some other strong engine work on each of the 960 possible FischerRandom positions? Would the evaluations stay close to 0.00, or are there some positions that are much better for White (or Black?). Wouldn't it be neat if you could place an engine on auto-pilot to crunch through each position for a fixed amount of time? Some engines already have this feature. All you need is an EPD file of all the positions you want to crunch. Does such a file exist? A file with all 960 FischerRandom starting positions? If there wasn't before, there is now :) First, I'd like to say that I'm not a programmer. You say C, I say "See what?" You say bitboard, I say "I'm a bit bored too." But I've always been keen to join the ranks of the elite that hang out in the computer chess forums. So this is my first try at real programming (except for a little Basic on a TRS-80 in high school). I found an algorithm to create the FischerRandom starting positions on http://www.chessvariants.com. It's fairly straightforward and involves several rolls of a 6-sided die. The EPD specifications can be found at http://pgn.freeservers.com With these two reference points and "Active Server Pages for Dummies", I set out to write a program to generate an EPD file of all 960 FR positions. My language of choice was VBScript because I can immediately use it to makeover my website with ASP and it builds a good foundation for learning Visual Basic. The fruits of my labor are online to be shared with everyone. Visit my website at http://www.winboard.info and click on the link to the EPD. The page uses client-side scriping, so your browser should be VBScript-enabled. If you "View Source", you can see the entire code in the Script section. Feedback is welcomed. A helluva lot of work went into this little program. I had a lot of bugs, including some faulty logic in coding the algorithm, but one by one, I solved them all and have a great feeling of accomplishment. The next planned project will be an addition to my website... a searchable database of Winboard engines. Let me know what you think. I'm glad I can communicate talk with you all, programmer to programmer :) PS If anyone has a spare PC, you can try letting Crafty or Yace crunch through the EPD. At 3 minutes/move, it will take 2880 minutes = 48 hours. Let me know what you find.
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