Author: Joachim Rang
Date: 23:47:03 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 I disagree, it has high commercial value. I'd be happy if there were a chess program, which does play actually like a _human_ 1600 or 1800 player. With Fritz it's often boring, since it outplays you and then horrible blunders, that's no fun. I think the best thing would be, search brute-force to the greatest depth possible and then select some inferior moves. For a really weak player one might play form time to time blunders (but not the real stupid ones) and for stronger player one might play simple positional suboptimal moves. I think an engine should exactly know what it is going to do in order to play weaker. With such sophisticated knowledge it should also be possible to create special training personalities (one could deactivate certain eval-features for that). regards Joachim
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