Author: David Blackman
Date: 22:36:15 01/05/00
Go up one level in this thread
On January 05, 2000 at 12:17:33, Will Singleton wrote: > >After appearing on ICC a few years back, KnightCap (TDChess) improved it's blitz >rating rapidly (a few weeks) to about 2400-2500. It has stayed there ever >since. > >The intent of KnightCap was to implement TD learning, and not to develop the >engine. Therefore, I don't know what engine he used as the basis for his >development work, but I'd assume it was some freely available source. If your >goal is to work solely on the eval, then you do not work on the engine. In >fact, to work on the engine would invalidate the results of the experiment. Actually KnightCap came first. It was written by Andrew Tridgell, with about as much effort as i suggested. It was made available freely as source. It was not based on any other engine, but its algorithms and structure are mostly well known ones you can read about in the literature. It's move generator was probably new, based on an idea of Anthony Wesley and myself that we never got around to implementing. Then Jon Baxter took a copy, hacked in the automatic learning (with a little help from Andrew Tridgell and Lex Weaver) and called the new version WimpKnight. This is the one that got written up in the research papers. Then Jon Baxter threw out most of the KnightCap code and rewrote it as a new program called TDChess. This still has the automatic learning, and is faster but probably dumber than WimpKnight. Meanwhile, Andrew Tridgell's KnightCap has had a few new hacks added, including a form of automatic learning similar to that used by WimpKnight and TDChess. It is probably about the same strength as TDChess despite being much slower, and not having any significant work done on it for 18 months. >btw, what happened to Desperado? Does it play on ICC or Fics? It has played on Fics, but never ICC. I've currently forgotten both the handle and password for Fics (it wasn't desperado, someone else (probably human) is called that). I was operating by hand on Fics and got a rating around 2000 i think. Operating by hand was not much fun. Now i have it working with Xboard/Zippy, but won't play again until i get the current rewrite into a reasonably stable form. >Will
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.