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Subject: Re: Engines, weak "by default"

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 05:04:37 05/05/05

Go up one level in this thread


On May 05, 2005 at 06:01:02, Mike Hood wrote:

>On May 04, 2005 at 11:16:55, Uri Blass wrote:
>
>>On May 04, 2005 at 09:09:25, Robert Hollay wrote:
>>
>>>  I'd like to download some freeware engines, which are weaker
>>>by default (say 1200-1600 ELO), with WB or UCI interfaces, but have
>>>an interesting or "human-like" playing style.
>>>  Yes, there is a plenty of links to free engines on chess sites,
>>>but I have small bandwith, so cannot download and try out each ...
>>>
>>>Thanks in advance for any help or suggestion!
>>>
>>>Robert
>>
>>Why do you need weak by default?
>>
>>It is possible to change the personality of Movei to make it weak.
>>I guess that if you change the piece square table of Movei to tell it that a
>>queen is less than a pawn and that knights have negative value it will do the
>>trick(I never tried it but people who are interested in doing it  can do it).
>>
>>Uri
>
>Uri, the question is "How can I make an engine beatable without making it play
>stupid?" There are a few answers to this question:
>
>1) Write an engine which has a weak evaluation algorithm, for instance by not
>giving it much positional information. (I think this is what Robert was looking
>for).
>
>2) Make slight changes to piece values. For instance, change a Knight's value to
>2 (instead of 3) to encourage the computer to make spectacular looking but often
>unsuccessful sacrifice exchanges. Changing a Queen's value from 9 to less than 1
>would be too drastic.

considering the fact that you talk about weak level of 1200-1600 I think that
changing the queen value to less than 1 may not be too drastic.

I guess that players with rating of 1200 may lose even if they get queen for
knight advantage if they face good defence and a computer that does good search
will not give them an easy way.

Uri



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