MYG

[JJJ]

And to be clear, I m glad you improved your engine so much Robert. I can't wait to see it play in TCEC and I wish you good luck. Maybe you will win again after all

[shrapnel]

And to be clear, I m glad you improved your engine so much Robert. I can't wait to see it play in TCEC and I wish you good luck. Maybe you will win again after all

Yes, he will. I'm quite sure of it.
Stockfish Dev. isn't too impressive nowadays, as Ray Banks pointed out.
Houdart must have discovered something new....

[cdani]

Houdart must have discovered something new....

Not really necessary. Just being a little more chess oriented or less restrictive in the testing method, allows you to find quite different stuff from the accostumied in Stocfish framework.

[Nordlandia]

Robert: one question -> did you look upon Nalimov crash?

The Nalimov code is legacy (meaning that I'm not going to tinker too much with it) and in my opinion quite obsolete since Syzygy is available.
If you encounter crashes, my best advice would be to reduce the number of threads or increase the probing depth.

Some would definitely call Nalimov obsolete but i find DTM quite useful for endgame analysis and extra depth to mate information is useful for Fritz Let's Check, where engine pv get cached in database. #25 look better than 138.XXX in my book.

[melajara]

Should be Stockfish ASM

[Frank Brenner]

Hello Robert,

very well done !

I hope you are going to sell the new houdini additional to the single version in the same way as Komodo is beeing sold: with a 1 year subscription to receive several updates for a period of one year for free .

[shrapnel]

I hope you are going to sell the new houdini additional to the single version in the same way as Komodo is beeing sold: with a 1 year subscription to receive several updates for a period of one year for free .

No such luck.
Mr Houdart believes in the Annual Update Model

[Lyudmil Tsvetkov]

besides, Houdini is using some contempt to beat up on weaker engines, so current SF development will still be on top.

No significant Contempt in my plots. The scaling is the issue at TCEC. SMP seems fairly equal, but with time control, SF seems to scale a bit better (up to now, but things can change).

significant or not significant, that wins points.

it is sufficient to avoid a bunch of 3-folds to add another 10-15 elo in the list.

[Lyudmil Tsvetkov]

So, it is not the final Houdini here. I m glad, because it still need some elo to beat Stockfish directly.

And I was right since the begining, that's good to me. Where is my free copy ?:D

he will add another 40 elo for the final release.

[Lyudmil Tsvetkov]

A top engine got improved by 50 to 60 Elo in 10 months, and your contribution is... a rant?

my calculation is not more than 50.
how do you get to that 60 estimate?

obviously, the 3 top engines are again and again on par, so where exactly do you think my statement is wrong?
I stated no one made a major breakthrough, nothing new under the Sun, so where exactly is my statement wrong?

my contribution being only a rant, well, I don't know, we have been discussing an awful lot of positions on this forum, but certainly you don't read it, I also recently published an interesting book full of chess knowledge, but again, you have been to busy tweaking Houdini.

But it's not nearly as straightforward as you think. While engines have many high-level similarities, the low level differences usually are too big for any of the SF improvement ideas or "patches" to be applicable or useful for other engines.

that is true, but again, what about the patches tested on the Framework that don't work in SF, but could possibly work in Houdini?

I agree though that process is not straightforward at all.