41–50 of 113 posts
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Yes that way also works! But the xboard way allows me to modify the engine, get debug output, try various different weights for pieces, put two engines against each other to see how specific features affect game play... It helps me demystify such sophisticated software.
heh, did you ever upload a match between two engines to the site and let the online engine analyze it?
Can anyone comment on what makes stockfish different from other chess engines? If I'm curious about state of the art in computer chess, is it worthwhile to study its source? What interesting ideas should I expect to see there beyond what I vaguely know to be the standard approach from introductory AI courses, i.e. some sort of alpha-beta pruning search?
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Have computers and software progressed that much since the Deep Blue days? I didn't realize that chess has pretty much been solved now. Are computers really that much better than people nowadays?
Stockfish has been available for quite a while, and over the last few years has been recognised as being the strongest open-source chess engine. It's fantastic to see it take on the best commercial engines toe-to-toe and come out on top. These ratings are computer ratings, and because they are playing very much isolates (computers vs other computers), without enough external human encounters, the ratings are consiste…
I don't think that the present situation, when the top chess playing program is free and open-source, is good for innovation. I estimate that it would take me six months of work to get to the top-20 in the world, and I don't see how I can justify that work to myself.
I did not downvote you. Your comment seems either ignorant of the amount of work involved, or very arrogant about your skill, but does not provide any information for me to judge. Why do you think you could beat even rybka with just six months of work?
I was a half-pro ~10 years ago. I won the championship of my country. I wrote an M.Sc. thesis on evaluation tuning. If I'd use the standard approach that I already know, 6 months is a conservative estimate. The question is - what for?
From a statistical point of view, this isn't actually significant, despite the fact that draws help reduce the variance.
45 of those games are draws, leaving a 13-6 score in favor of Stockfish. Considering a null hypothesis of a binomial distribution with n=19 and equal chance of winning, the two-sided p-value for that score is 0.115. Unless you already have strong evidence that Stockfish is better than Komodo, you shouldn't conclude anything about which one is best.
> During the final event, after playing 64 games against Komodo, Stockfish won with the score of 35½-28½. No doubt is further allowed: Stockfish is the best chess player ever! From a statistical point of view, this isn't actually significant, despite the fact that draws help reduce the variance. 45 of those games are draws, leaving a 13-6 score in favor of Stockfish. Considering a null hypothesis of a binomial distri…
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You can watch Magnus Carlsen play a chess program on his phone here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNvVWeHZG00 As you can tell from his commentary, he thinks the machine is rather stupid (and he is winning after the opening) but the machine is a much better calculator than he is and when the situation becomes more concrete he has to force a draw. Of course, the computer on his phone is considerably worse than the b…
> but top chess players generally consider computers to be excellent calculators but dumb in terms of general strategy. Is computer assisted chess a thing? Perhaps with standardized hardware, but any software. In chess I'm good at strategy but terrible at calculating and I miss obvious stuff all the time in my fight for strategy. I always thought I'd do great with computer assistance to look for the obvious stuff, an…
Are chess engines still trying to play against humans in an interesting way? (I understand they beat human players, but that people feel computers play in dull ways). Is there a Turing Test for computer chess, where humans and computers play each other and they, and commentators, analyse the play, but no-one knows who is a computer or human until after the commentary is published? And if we ignore humans are people p…
Without knowing anything about chess, I'd say that makes humans sounds like sore losers. I wonder if this will lead to having tournaments where you don't get points for winning matches but rather get judged on style by a panel of (human) judges...
What I would love to see is work on chess engines having better strength levels for amateurs. For me at least there is a line where everything below a certain level I can beat 95 percent of the time and everything at or above that level I lose to 95 percent of the time.