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Subject: Re: More about the Gothic Vortex Program, $10,000 challenge

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 22:53:52 12/31/03

Go up one level in this thread


On January 01, 2004 at 01:33:36, Ed Trice wrote:

>I hope nobody minds that I spawn a new post although this is really part of a
>threat. I was getting carpal tunnel scrolling down and follwing the nested,
>nested, nested replies. I will try to get everyone up to speed quickly.
>
>First to all those "chess only" readers, this is Gothic Chess, played on an
>80-square board with two new pieces; the Archbishop (Bishop + Knight) and
>Chancellor (Rook + Knight). If you are not interested in this variant, stop
>reading now :)
>
>Ok, if you are still reading and never heard of Gothic Chess, a pitstop to the
>link http://www.GothicChess.org will be worth the time.
>
>A discussion had ensued about my Gothic Vortex program (80-bit using 64-bit and
>16-bit components) and the performance of 32-bit chess programs.
>
>I think I can distill the essentials of what could be viewed as a disagreement
>or disbelief among the programming enthusiasts.
>
>First, Gothic Vortex borrows some of the Craft technology, thank you Dr. Robert
>Hyatt, my new best friend :)
>
>Second, during the construction of the move generator, I reported a nodes/second
>count of 140 million, causing some consternation.
>
>It should be emphasized that this figure was not from an alpha-beta search from
>a fixed position, nor anything similar. I had mentioned how I had arrived at
>this figure, by putting pieces on each square (from a1 to j8) then repeatedly
>calling my "move_gen" routine in a for loop a fixed number of times (I think
>100,000 per position) then counting the nodes spawned, then dividing by the time
>taken.
>
>I understood this was not a representation of the full speed of the program; as
>it was in the early stages, it was the only metric I had to test my 80-bit move
>generation routines.
>
>Someone had contacted me asking me for test data. I provided what I had.
>
>Thirdly, I could only compare my chess variant of Gothic Chess against the only
>other Gothic Chess program out there, which was from the Zillions-Of-Games
>company. Granted, this is an engine that can work for games of ANY size and rule
>configuration, which is a feat unto itself, but my results comparing it to
>Gothic Vortex were veritable.
>
>Gothic Vortex is 30 times as fast as this generic engine.
>
>It is the only way we can compare engines, as no other chess engine operates on
>80 squares.
>
>Gothic Vortex played a 10 game match with Zillions and won 10-0, not even a
>single draw, at 3 minutes per move. Since Zillions plays the same way every time
>(no opening book) we let Vortex pick openings at random (it has a book of about
>6000 opening positions.)
>
>Now several "proposals" have been offered to compare the engine speed of Gothic
>Vortex to other chess engines, but comparing 80 square boardds to 64 square
>boards seem rather pointless.
>
>So, here is the kicker.
>
>I will pay anyone $10,000 that produces a Gothic Chess program that can defeat
>Gothic Vortex in a match to take place in the city of Philadelphia no later than
>August 1, 2004.

I guess that you mean that you will pay the first programmer who produce
it(otherwise the money that you pay is not bounded and in theory can be
1,000,000$ if 100 programmers do it independently).

Uri



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