TalkChess.com

[Peter Österlund]

Background

I recently converted my java chess engine CuckooChess to C++ (and renamed it to Texel). As a result the engine became approximately twice as fast. Initial tests suggest that the elo gain is much larger than what would have been expected according to the old rule that you gain 50-70 elo points for each doubling of the speed.

In an attempt to understand what is going on I played a time odds match using three different engines.

Match conditions

* Three engines tested: stockfish, crafty, texel
* Each engine plays at three different time controls:
1: 60 moves in 6 seconds
2: 60 moves in 12 seconds
3: 60 moves in 24 seconds
* Ponder off
* One CPU
* 128MB transposition table
* Openings selected randomly from a set of 7316 book lines, each line 10 ply deep.
* Each opening line played twice with colors reversed second time.
* Three test computers used, all running 64 bit linux.
- Core2 Quad 2.4GHz
- Core i7 870, 2.93GHz
- Core2 Duo, 2.6GHz
* Tournament where each engine plays all other engines.
* Total number of games: 14976
* Total number of games per engine: 3328
* Total number of games between each pair of engines: 416
* Total number of time losses: 1

Results

Rating computations were performed using bayeselo. All 14976 games together gives the following rating table: