QueeNy - thanks HG

[Graham Banks]

New WB engine from H.G Muller. Trying it out now!
Thanks HG.


Logo made using "Paint" on a free image from the net.

[JuLieN]

Nice! Thanks HG!

Could you please describe us what's new with this engine? What's its differences with your previous engines?

[tmokonen]

It's not that new. I downloaded this beast back in January.

[Graham Banks]

It's not that new. I downloaded this beast back in January.

Okay. Just saw it appear on Leo's site, so thought it must be new.

[tmokonen]

Okay. Just saw it appear on Leo's site, so thought it must be new.

Harm didn't mention anything about it in the main forum. It was discussed in this thread, which had a link to live games where QueeNy defeated Houdini in positions with an unusual material balance. (the link to live games seems to no longer work)

http://talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=37677

[hgm]

Beware that QueeNy is NOT an engine designed to play normal Chess, and is probably not worth valuable testing time. I am sure it will play like cr*p in normal games. It is also not very new; I think that version is already on the web for more than a year. In January I showed it off against Houdini, but mid 2010 I already ran a similar web demo against Stockfish, Crafty, DayDreamer.

It is a clone of one of the early versions of the engine Spartacus, which still is in development. The only change is that it uses a value 500 for the Knight in stead of the regular 325 (where Q=950, R=500, B=325 etc.), and I am pretty sure that this will totally wreck it for playing normal Chess, as it will seek to trade Rooks for Knights, and Queens for two Knights.

Because of this, it is only suitable to play from the "Charge of the Light Brigade" position:

[d]1q1qk1q1/3ppp2/8/8/8/2N2N2/3PPP2/1NNNKNN1 w - - 0 1

With this material composition it is good to trade Q against 2N. (Although it will not save the Queens, but at least they would be able to beat 6 Knights with that strategy.) And the high Knight value was a hack to make Queeny avoid such trades, by keeping all its Knights twice protected. (The proper way to do it would be to keep Knight at 325, and use a material term that sets Queen to 1050, but subtracts 50 for each opposing Knight. Then the evaluation would not get unrealistic with low numbers of Knights. But I never bothered, because with the modification QueeNy will never get into such positions in Charge of the Light Brigade, usually still having 5 Knights when the opponent is reduced to a bare King.

So don't waste your time on Queeny unless you want to play from this position. (Or the one with 6 Knights, where you delete Nd1; it can also beat Stockfish and Crafty from that position with white, but not itself or Houdini. Six Knights vs 3 Queens seems really lost, and despite its misevaluation Houdini outsearches Queeny by so much that it will usually be able to find the win for the Queens.)

[Graham Banks]

Beware that QueeNy is NOT an engine designed to play normal Chess, and is probably not worth valuable testing time.......

Okay. Thanks for letting me know.
Still looking forward to a new chess engine or new version of Joker from you.

[Matthias Gemuh]

Beware that QueeNy is NOT an engine designed to play normal Chess, ...

... it uses a value 500 for the Knight in stead of the regular 325 (where Q=950, R=500, B=325 etc.), and I am pretty sure that this will totally wreck it for playing normal Chess, as it will seek to trade Rooks for Knights, and Queens for two Knights.

Wow ! an engine that plays like my BigLion.

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