Author: Djordje Vidanovic
Date: 08:43:10 01/23/99
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On January 23, 1999 at 10:52:02, Robert Hyatt wrote: >This is wrong. The version of bionic that playedin the first 1/2 of the >Dutch tournament matched crafty _exactly_. Every move of every game except >for 1 or 2. > >But that isn't nearly so important as one key thing they 'get'... that being >a parallel search that no one else has. Which gives them a 2x-3x speed boost >over everyone else. So to say 'it isn't crafty' is baloney. A few eval changes >don't make a new program. I've also pointed out that anybody that takes the >crafty source is _required_ to make that source public as part of the freeware >project. They've never done this. IE I'd like to see a source version >released that will _exactly_ match the Dutch tourney moves. _then_ we could >_know_ what is different. They were going to do this, supposedly. But nothing >has been done. Hello, Bob. I am merely a go-between. An intrigued and quite interested go-between, but a go-between nevertheless. I went over to the Bionic Home Page (http://www.impakt.be/bionic) and here's what I read over there (I do, however, stand by my previous observation that the Bionic I saw in action is simply very much different from Crafty): History Bionic - Basic BIONIC (Believe It Or Not, It's Checkmate !) is a chess program originally designed by the flemish chess player Hans Secelle. Already a few months after the first version was written, both Albrecht Heeffer and Matt Casters (author of one of the very the first non-japanese Shogi programs) joined the author to form the so-called "B-team" (the A-team had already retired). Albrecht continuously provided fast hardware and Matt had the occasional 'good idea'. At the time, Bionic was written 'from scratch' in Basic (compiled with Quickbasic 4.5, later PDS 7.1) and was based on two famous books: 'Schaken voor computers' (Van den Herik, Van Diepen) and 'Het computerschaakboek' (Kraas, Schrufer, Bartels). In 1994, Bionic entered the Dutch computerchess championship as first ever Belgian fully competitive chessprogram. Although this version did NOT have: iterative deepening; null-move: pvs-search; hashtables; permanent brain; history or refutation tables; the stalemate 3-fold repetition 50-move rules it scored a fully deserved 3/11 pts. and got an award as "best" newcomer. (See games archives for games scores). Six months later, Bionic entered the 9th Aegon Tournament and scored its first ever win against an expert class human player. It had a completely lost position but capitalized on an overplay by his unfortunate opponent. November 1995 saw Bionic in his second Dutch Open ComputerCchess Championship, this time to score 4/11, the only point of interest being the win against Impakt, the program of teammate Matt Casters. April 1996 saw both Bionic and Impakt at the 10th Aegon tournament, were both programs performed relatively well, scoring 2/6 though it must be said that Impakt had the stronger opposition (IGM Ree, IM Hartoch). In november 1996, Bionic played its third Dutch open and scored a mere 2,5/11, having only a draw against the strong program 'Ant' (Tom Vijlbrief) to its credit. April 1997 featured the 11th and (unfortunately) last Aegon tournament. This time, Bionic performed extremely poorly, scoring only half a point against Dutch expert Nico Kuijff and losing the five remaining games. The downward spiral continued with a disastruous 4th particpiation in the Dutch Open when Bionic scored it's worst result ever: 1,5/11. At least 6 games were lost in the engame due to the lack of hashtables, though positionally it showed some good sense in its game against Rookie (Marcel Van Kervinck) Bionic - Impakt At this point it was decided that either the program would be written in C or cease it's existence completely. Bionic had already been translated into C on a 1 to 1 base in a few weeks time by januari 1997, running 30.000 nps on a P133., but unfortunately, it contained a bug that even Chrilly Donninger could not find. Therefore, some more drastic measures were needed. In november 1997, an old Crafty-version (9.26) was downloaded, stripped of all it's knowledge (evaluation, preevaluation, knowledge parameters, time control, openingbook, endgame table-recognition, etc.) until only the search engine and part of the pawn evaluation were left over. Then, slowly, all knowlegde thet Bionic contained was added to the Crafty skeleton but the first test was disastruous: Crafty 15.20 beat Bionic Impakt 3-1. Obviously, we took out much more than we put in, so some extra's were needed. As to the abovementioned "extra's" , I remembered a conversation that I had with Nico Kuijff (see above) who said: "If I were to write a chess program, I would teach it to "look" thoroughly at the position BEFORE doing anything else". Or, as Max Euwe wrote in "Judgement and planning" : 'Make a plan that meets the requirements of the position' So, I started to write a completely new pre-scan routine (the details of which I will publish in due time) that contained MORE knowledge than was left over in Crafty's evaluation function. When this was done, Albrecht persuaded me to port the source into a likewisely stripped 15.20 version of Crafty, a version that supported multi-processing. This second port was frustrating, in that all parameters had to be readjusted, as the value of a pawn was reduced to 100 (1000 in Crafty 9.26) and all other value's accordingly. The results though were impressive: Bionic Impakt scored 2540 on the Louget test (Crafty 15.20 scored 2455) on an SMP-machine that Albrecht had assembled and which contained 2 P450-processors, overclocked to 500 MHZ, and enabling Bionic Impakt to do 360.000 nps on average. Belgian Fide-master Geert Vanderstricht offered to function as sparring partner and played BI on two occasions. The first match, BI ran on a P350 and beat Geert 7-2. The second match, two weeks later, BI ran on the Dual and scored 7.5-1.5. Thus BI arrived at a TPR of 2393, clearly approaching IM-level in playing strenght. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- © 1998 by Hans Secelle & Albrecht Heeffer
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