Author: Dan Honeycutt
Date: 19:03:09 04/18/04
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On April 18, 2004 at 20:36:56, Steve Maughan wrote: >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 Playing good bad chess is no easy matter. My thought is to do a shallow negamax search with no alpha-beta pruning so you get a score for every move. If one move looks appreciably better than the others, play it. (anything else is apt to be a blatant blunder). If several moves look about the same, take the search deeper and look for one of these several to drop in score. If that happens, play that move. We know it's bad, but it's not obviously bad. If no move drops in score, pick one of the several at random. Dan H.
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