Author: Steve Maughan
Date: 17:36:56 04/18/04
I'm looking to implement the new ELO rating support in UCI 2. In the past I haven't given much thought as to how one could make an engine predictably weaker. Does anyone have any suggestions? After the little thought I have given the subject here's what I've come up with. 1. Search to a shallower depth / shorter time. This seems somewhat unsatisfactory as it will ignore the other setting. 2. Add random elements to the evaluation term - the bigger the term the weaker the play. 3. Round off at the root. So to weaken the engine slightly you would have the root round off to 0.1 pawns, a further weakening would be in units of 0.5 pawns etc. This means that if a value came back as +1.23 the engine would regard it as +1.20. I like this idea since it is relatively simple to implement :-). However I'm not sure how effective it would be at actually weakening the engine (it may speed the engine up since there may be more cuttoffs!?!). 4. Within the tree you could ignore some moves e.g. all losing capture after x depth. This is also interesting. It may closely match how humans think and err. Of course it is more complex to implement. Any other ideas. This could be an interesting area for discussion as it has virtually no commercial value (IMO nobody is going to buy an engine that is weak). I'd be interested to know of other idea. Regards, Steve Maughan
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