Author: Bob Durrett
Date: 18:07:23 01/01/04
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On January 01, 2004 at 08:50:13, Robert Pawlak wrote: >Hi all, > >I recently got a new notebook that I am using for play against the computer (new >p4). Only, I find that many of the handicapping tricks that I used with my old >pentium do not dumb down the engines sufficiently on my hardware. For instance, >shutting permanent brain off, or limiting hash table sizes (also, it seems like >many engines today assume the existence of hash) used to work pretty well for >me. > >So the quesiton is this. Are there any engines (winboard or UCI) that have >options for dumbing down the engine a bit? I don't want to limit ply depth (too >unrealistic in terms of time usage and endgame play). I've used the -e option in >phalanx, and the strength option in Delfi to good effect, but I would like to >know if there are any other engines with similar features. > >I don't want to spot the engine pieces, or use different time controls either. >And I've tried the strength option in arena, and I find the time usage to be too >unrealistic. > >Thanks much, >Bob Bob P, you may recall an idea I posted here about a year or two ago. The idea is to make the engine use the second-best or third-best move. Unfortunately, you may not be able to see that without also seeing the best move displayed. Maybe using a cardboard sheet on your screen to cover up the best move so you would not see it would work, but that might become tiresome before long. I don't know exactly how one could do this but the basic idea should work. Maybe some friendly programmer will be nice enough to make it an option for the user to set the engine to display [send to GUI] only the second-best or third-best move. Then the engine will be dumber. This, unfortunately, might not make the engine play in a human-like fashion, but it would at least be more human-like in the sense that non-master humans make many second-best or third-best moves. That ought to be good enough to dumb-down the engine to around 2200 I suspect. To get it "dumber," the programmer must find a way to cause the engine to make many tactical mistakes. Maybe limiting depth of search would emulate human amateurs since human amateurs may not be able to see very far in their head. Whatever. Bob D.
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