Author: Andrew Williams
Date: 09:54:57 09/19/04
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On September 19, 2004 at 11:10:14, Stuart Cracraft wrote: >Hi -- I am looking for 2 or 3 beta testers who would receive >(full) source code to my program and in return would provide >input and comments about improving the search. They would >simply agree not to redistribute it and in fact discard it after >a week or two of looking at it (and commenting.) The program is in C, >5000 lines. The search and quiescence routines are 600 lines total. > >The reason I am considering this is due to hitting a brick wall at 249/300 >on WAC for several weeks now and knowing there are things I just cannot >find or go further with. The above score is at 1 second per position on a >1ghz P3 with a small transposition table. I am told that 270-300 is considered >"good" for this time control on this test. On this same machine >at the same time setting, with WAC, Crafty gets 270/300. > It strikes me that comparing your program with crafty (or any other program for that matter) based on 1 second searches in WAC is a bit weird. And a waste of time. I'm pretty sure, for example, that my program would do worse at WAC 1 second searches than yours on that hardware and I certainly don't care either way. Solving WAC positions is a *side-effect* of being a good program, in my opinion. I would strongly encourage you to play some games. Is your program WinBoard compatible? If so, send it to Leo Dijksman, Guenther Simon and lots of the other good testers who hang out at Winboard Forum. Those tourneys are great fun to play in. Also, download a few of the engines in Leo's Division 6 (or whichever is lowest) and try a few matches. Pick an engine which loses to yours about 80-90% of the time in quick games, then play a series of 15-minute games overnight or (better) over the course of a few days. Then focus on the games that your program *loses* and play them through slowly, following your program's search output as it plays. You will learn lots and lots about your program's weaknesses. Once you've fixed a few things, try again against that program and if things look better, choose another program. Keep doing this against weak programs for a while, then slowly improve the standard of your opponents. If you still care about it, your WAC scores will improve, but I would say that searching at 1 second per position is pretty pointless anyway. Best of luck with it anyway. Andrew
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