Author: Mike Byrne
Date: 04:32:46 07/23/03
Go up one level in this thread
On July 23, 2003 at 03:37:17, Derek Paquette wrote: >As the topic says I do not know much about Crafty, but I do know this >it is talked about a lot >I have it on my system 19.03, The winboard version running under wb2uci appears to be stronger than the native chessbase version. This was not always the case -- at one time the native chessbase version was stronger than the winboard version using the winboard adapter. With that said, most of the top commerical engines may be a little stronger. Although, I have run many tournaments using multiple crafty's and one or mor crafty's finished ahead of commercial engines - so IMo the difference is not that great. Crafty is one of the top "free" engines and may be the "top engine" with freely available source. Pepito is also strong with open source, but my experience is more limited with Pepito. >it doesn't win much vs commercial engines, >but is that because it is not DESIGNED to beat them? Crafty is tuned for playing humans IMO. Since Crafty can also run on mutiple CPU machines, it will more than hold its own running on a souped up quad against any commerical engine running on a single CPU. >I notice its ply count is low aswell, compared to say Juniors, >is that because Craft has a more 'true' ply search? Ply level, node count in the end do not really matter. It's more of question of what moves/trees are being examined - is the engine examing the right moves? That's hard to compare when looking at other engines. Some engines are super fast ply/node seraches others are slower. Junior is fast. The King is much slower. That doe snot mean the "the King" is weaker than chess - it's quality and evaluation of nodes searched not number of nodes/ply searched. But most importantly Crafty is part of PC Computer lore. It's been around a long time, it has always been free, it always had open source and it was one of the first in many attributes for PC's , hashtables, egtb, smp-capable etc etc. With its open source, I'm sure it has been a gold mine for other chess programmers to pick from. Finally , its author, Bob Hyatt, author of Cray Blitz and the only two time Wold Computer Chess Champion (WCCC not be confused with WMCCC or World Microcomputer Chess Champion where Richard Lang is a 6 time winner. The WCCC is only once every 3 years. The WMCCC is held every year.) is reknowned for his generosity for helping all chess programmers throughout the world for giving all of us Crafty - a direct descendant of Cray Blitz (2 time WCCC Champion) and piece of computer ches history for free. So there is much more to Crafty than "just a program" http://www.mark-weeks.com/chess/wcc-comp.htm
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