Author: Georg v. Zimmermann
Date: 09:28:27 06/01/03
Go up one level in this thread
Hi, The first bughouse chess engine I know of was a modified crafty, but it was buggy and did hang often. Then came "Skyshark" and "DeepBug", which play at around 1800 level, and can take advise from its partners. GCP's older Sjeng versions played bughouse, and did very well. Actually the name of the program "Sjeng" is the reverse of the long time #1 human bughouse player, "Gnejs". Some 3-4 years ago, I dont remember exactly, I began improving the DeepBug program. I was very lucky to have picked a program to improve upon whos author was extremely helpfull and which has very clear data structures. Even after years of programming, and several complete redesigns of search and evaluation, big changes to the move generation and innumerable bug fixes the underlying structure is obviously the same. I called that "clone" Sunsetter. With the most recent Sunsetter versions I have abandoned bughouse support and first concentrated on crazyhouse, and then for a few weeks on normal chess. The main reason are this: a) many strong bughouse players understandably dont enjoy playing engines , because playing them has a very artificial feeling, therefore it is hard to find good opponents , which is frustrating for an author b) a really strong bughouse program would have to know what is going on on the other board. Winbaord doesnt suport that. And I was too lazy to write interfacing software to the servers just for that task of observing the partners game and playing at the same time. c) and this is probably the most important point: Bughouse largely depends on speed (I can explain if it isnt clear why so). It is pretty easy to make a program fast , doubling the speed only costs you 50 raw "elo". By making a program that takes only 100ms per move, I could create something very strong, which would be even more artificial. Therfeore I dont make it move that fast. But it is an odd feeling to know how you could easily make your program stronger, but you dont do it, because it would make playing it much less enjoyable. This is very much unlike chess. Georg On June 01, 2003 at 10:02:12, Uri Blass wrote: >Here is a link for the rules of bughouse > >http://www.chessvariants.com/multiplayer.dir/tandem.html > >This game is 2 against 2 and more complicated than regular chess >I wonder if there are programs that can play this game and what is their level >relative to humans. > >If there are programs that play this game then what is the level of >program+program or of program+human in this game relative to human+human? > >Uri
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.