Indeed. *My contention was that MyChess plays "decent enough"
especially considering the small footprint and age. *It is certainly
not of championship caliber and will likely lose to better human
players. *I do want to match it against GitClub some time just for the
fun of seeing the resulting game.

Waiting for your games. And lets see how that scores against getclub.

If you know its rating, Then play with Beginner & Easy level and we
will know exact rating of GetClub Chess.

Bye
Sanny

Play Chess at: http://www.GetClub.com/Chess.html

On Jul 10, 6:53*pm, " wrote:
Now Rybka is only 8-10 times stronger thanGetClub. You give 10 times
more time toGetCluband it will play the move that Rybka will play.

How can you make this assertion? *Do you have any kind of evidence to
show that GitClub will *ever* find the same moves as Rybka?

I regularly play against Rybka and at the moment I find Rybka at 5
seconds plays as good as Easy Level at 50 seconds. So I feel GetClub
is 10 times weaker than Rybka.

Bye
Sanny

Play Chess at: http://www.GetClub.com/Chess.html

"Sanny" wrote in message
...

I regularly play against Rybka and at the moment I find Rybka at 5
seconds plays as good as Easy Level at 50 seconds. So I feel GetClub
is 10 times weaker than Rybka.

It's been mentioned before by many people and you ignored it before, but
I'll try again...

Your reasoning is flawed.

Rybka at 5 seconds per move is not going to play like it does at full time
settings.

For 5 seconds, it barely has time to do anything other than a quick tactical
search. It doesn't have time to bring out its full strength. It's like
comparing a bicycle to a motorcycle by seeing how fast you can back each out
of the parking spot. It's not realistic.


Also, Rybka will likely make much better use of its time than your program
will. Meaning that for Rybka, going from 5 seconds a move to 50 seconds a
move (10 times) will result in a much stronger game than if you gave your
program 500 seconds a move. Going all the way to 3 minutes a move for Rybka
will make it even stronger than if you increased your program's time by the
comparable amount.

The reason is that Rybka is likely to be much more efficient than yours. It
just makes better use of the time. In the factor of 36 difference in time
between a 5 second search and a normal 3 minute search, Rybka would probably
increase its search depth by up to nearly 5 plies.

(I have never played Rybka or looked at its source and I do not know its
search details, but top programs tend to have a search depth growth rate of
around 2.x. Meaning a factor of 2.x in time or speed means one extra ply of
search. This is in significant contrast to the antique programs that had a
growth of around 6.)

And since you are comparing your program to rybka when it's playing a such a
crippled time, your ratings can not be trusted.


If you were to do comparisons with Rybka at the normal 3 minutes a move,
then your results would be a bit more valid. And you could even use the
Technology curve to try and come up with some believable ratings. Provided
you *always* qualified the ratings with how you got them.

But doing Rybka at 5 seconds per move is ridiculous. Getting ratings from
such drastic time differences aren't realistic. And you need lots of games
against multiple oponents to come up with even vaguely believable numbers.



Also, by "10 times weaker", what do you mean... Wouldn't that suggest that
if Rybka has a rating of 3000, then your program would be 300??? (nasty
grin) (Alright, I know the math doesn't actually work quite like that, but
I couldn't resist.)





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On Jul 10, 8:06 am, Sanny wrote:

According to the description by Mr. Guest,
it also did not do Q-search--- which is the
very same problem we see with Sanny's
program, which is causing the program to
be even weaker at tactics than humans
are.

What is Q search?


Precisely.


--------------------------------------------------------------

We seemed to have a small problem with
the precise spelling of the term, so it was
shortened to just "Q". It's a chess-
programming technique by which tactical
exchanges are "resolved", handing the
result backward to the earlier nodes.

Where there are no tactics, the score of
a given position is just that; but where
there are checks and/or captures, they
are first "solved" and the result is then
passed back. In this way, you would
never score a position as "I'm ahead 0.1
because of my opponent's doubled
pawns" when you are really hanging a
Queen next move, to get out of check.

Chess is 99% tactics, sort of.


-- help bot

On Jul 10, 9:53 am, " wrote:

Now Rybka is only 8-10 times stronger than GetClub. You give 10 times
more time to GetClub and it will play the move that Rybka will play.

How can you make this assertion? Do you have any kind of evidence to
show that GitClub will *ever* find the same moves as Rybka?

Evidence?!!

Sanny is not a scientist; he is an artist.


-- help bot

On Jul 9, 2:57*pm, " wrote:
MyChess did have two problems though.,,, (etc.)

Very interesting info about this classic chess program. *However,
consider this: my compressed DOS binary is about 20k in size, and that
includes CGA graphics! *The program does a lot, considering its age
and its incredibly tiny footprint. *I have much admiration for what
the programmers of that era were able to do with relatively limited
computing resources. *In the end MyChess plays a decent enough game
for the most part, and even plays by the rules! *Sanny might learn
from this.

For those who are not aware, Kittinger updated his engine for the
"Majestic Chess" program that was released about five years ago. The
engine played pretty well, although the complex interface and graphics
requirements of the game (it was designed to be attractive and give
competition to Chessmaster) meant that the engine itself could only
use about 50-70% of the CPU. Not sure what will happen on dual-core
systems now.

jm

On Jul 10, 10:54 am, "Guest" wrote:

Also, I'm a little suspicious that the program speed is doubling every
month. That means in 5 months it's 32 times faster than before. This is
*not*, repeat *NOT*, the same as comparing the play to Rybka or anything
like that, but a real, genuine faster program (like if you moved to a
computer that was 32 times faster than it was 5 months ago.)

Note that Sanny's program started out
well below the 1000 USCF level, based on
casual observation. So if he were to add
a whopping 600 points due to repeated
speed-ups, this is not so far-fetched as
you might imagine.

I'm not so sure he's actually talking about doubling of his program's speed.

He seems to be talking more about his program finding the claimed 'right'
rybka answer that is increasing.


In reality, he has done *both*.


That's not quite the same thing. Which is why I made sure I stressed that.

Those kind of improvements are the 'fuzzy' kind that require formal testing
methods to estimate ratings. You can't estimate based on the Tech curve.

For his program to start below 1000 rating is pretty significant... How the
EXPLETIVE can you get a proram to play that poorly on today's hardware??!
Even a program that looks at only material and mobility should be stronger
than that.


Precisely. That other guy -- the one who
started claiming that all the "experts" agree
with him, ala Nick Bourbaki -- can't seem to
see the forest for the trees.

My suggestion to Sanny was to stop his
"improvement" nonsense-talk and try to
home-in on a correct handling of tactics.

The multitude of tied position scores can
be broken by factors such as mobility--
which is an example of what made the
now-ancient Fidelity tabletop computers
so good (relatively speaking). Those old-
timers got the basic tactics right-- and
that included the Q-search, and not
deliberately sacrificing pieces for only
two pawns and a spite-check as Sanny's
program often does.

Personally, I think that it might also aid
in reducing the number of alleged bugs he
keeps inventing as scapegoats for the
multitude of defeats the program suffers.
Fewer defeats equal a reduced need for
bogus excuses. And how do you get
fewer defeats? By improving at tactics.


-- help bot