Author: Richard Pijl
Date: 02:51:47 01/09/03
Go up one level in this thread
>>>I can announce that movei is not going to participate. >>> Which is entirely up to you of course >>>It has enough tournaments that it participates and I see no need to participate >>>in another tournament(it is better if I spend more time on fixing it and not on >>>looking at more games of it). As I have participated in two tournaments (both in Leiden) I can assure you that playing in those tournaments while watching the games will give you: - Time to really think about every move your engine plays, question it and think of ways to improve - Comments of opponents/bystanders about what the opponent/bystanders see in the position. - General hints and tips by opponents/bystanders During (!) the last tournament (Dutch-open) I solved two bugs after round 1, one more after round 3, and a whole bunch of bugs after round 6 (which was a whole week). In round 8 Baron gave away a draw against Tiger (!), and in round 11 it drew against the King. I'm very sure I would not have accomplished that without the things you're forced to look at. Solving bugs is still the best way of improving your engine ... >> >>I hope you will reconsider participating. I have found that the intensity of >>tournament plays brings more bugs to light than any other way. Agreed! >>Also, new ideas for improvements seem to follow from tournaments, perhaps >>because the author is more focused on the games. > >Movei is playing in enough tournaments. Even if you get the PGN _with_ the PV line, you still do not get the amount of information that you will get when watching the game being played. Like moves considered, fail-low/high sequences, score development in iterations etc. > >I do not see the big advantage from playing in another tournament. >It is better if I work about what I need to do. There aren't many tournaments like this, so I usually grab the chance of participating when I have the chance. The todo list will be long anyway no matter how much you work on your engine. > >There are a lot of free engines that movei can play against them. >I do not understand why the ICC tournament can help me more than games >that I get from other sources when the number of the games that I get from other >sources is clearly bigger. It's not quantity that counts, but quality. Sometimes you need only one game or position to find a lot of bugs. It's just a matter of careful watching what the engine does. There is more to it than just the move it plays! > >Games did not help me to find that movei use numextensions[-1] in the first >iteration >checkingbounds helped me to detect it. You should use all methods at your disposal to find bugs. Watch games being played is just one method. Bounds checking is another method. Also compiling your code with all warnings turned on can turn up bugs (type conversions to name just one). > >For some reason when I use test postions I find that the number of nodes is the >same even after correcting the error. Then you used the wrong testpositions for testing the improvement :-) >There was also another error(not deterministic error) before the error of >numextensions[-1] but for some reason I cannot reproduce it now. Games will turn up a lot of those, and even more when you're start doing cut-offs based on the transposition table. Non-deterministic errors in test positions are IMO pointing to uninitialized memory or out of bounds memory and most of those should be found with a bounds checker. >I believe that discussions here can help me more than games to get rid of these >errors. You will have those discussions online during tournaments ... >The main problem of movei except it is not bugs but lack of knowledge. >I looked in a lot of previous games of movei and I do not believe that new >tournaments are going to help me. If you have bugs in search or eval, correcting those will get you more than adding more knowledge. The main jumps in strength of the Baron are caused by solving bugs, not by adding new knowledge ... (adding knowledge usually introduces new bugs :-) ) Richard.
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