Houdini 1.5 is released

[Frank Quisinsky]

Hello Robert,

after so many criticism from myself ...

It seems that you be able to reaching bigger improvements.
I am looking forward to the IPON results.

Only to the points "all is from yourself - open chess forum -" I have bigger problems.

So it would be better if you can give clearer information to your "source-start-point" without to say "all is from myself".

By the way ...
Congratulation for *your* bigger improvements!
Here I think you make / made a very good work!

GaviotaBases support is great too!

I will test your new version too but so far I have to look that the still running SWCR-64 tourney will be ended. So I think I test Houdini 1.5 start of the next year.

Have thanks for Houdini 1.5!

Best
Frank

PS: After 920 SWCR games I had 56 crashes, most in end positions, means before the game ended (games in SWCR are with ponder without resign mode). Hope that I don't have again the same problem with version 1.5.

[Houdini]

quickly running through your engine & while it seems to be an improvement, it also (as far as i can tell) still lacks the 'creativity' that it shares with its lineage (i don't believe any of ippolit, crafty or stockfish are particularly good speculative engines). do you have any plans to address this and/or have you attempted to do so with 1.5?

Houdini 1.5 is more aggressive and more tactical than version 1.03, but it's still based on a very solid positional game.
Most of the human World Champions would fit that description, so it's not a disgrace .

[Houdini]

Feature request for Houdini 1.6:
When there is a tablebase mate, list the full pv to the end.

E.g.
+M8 Nxb3

does not show me the full idea.

You can easily collect it on the last iteration by just making the suggested moves and calling the EGTB again until we have exhausted the pv.

Dann, Houdini 1.5 should produce the full mate line when the root position is an EGTB mate, it already does exactly what you suggest.
Can you give me an example position in which it doesn't?

[Vinvin]

Feature request for Houdini 1.6:
When there is a tablebase mate, list the full pv to the end.

E.g.
+M8 Nxb3

does not show me the full idea.

You can easily collect it on the last iteration by just making the suggested moves and calling the EGTB again until we have exhausted the pv.

Only as an option, I hope, because that would raise the number of disk access ...

[Houdini]

the paypal donation is in euro only.
In Kentucky we are still using US$.

thanks
kburcham

Kim, thanks for donating. I guess that Paypal will take care of the euro/dollar conversion, for your info, 1€ is about 1.35$.

[M ANSARI]

It seems to have a problem with 8 cores or the CB GUI. When the engine loads and you play one move of a game the system will freeze. After forcing cut of the GUI application (Ctrl Atl Del) with taskmanager, the application is still there in task manager and must be manually killed to get system up again. Not sure if it is related to 8 cores or if it is related to the GUI ... or maybe related to Large Pages not being compiled properly as mentioned.

[swami]

Near perfect STS scores in some of the columns though there's still room for improvement!

[Houdini]

It seems to have a problem with 8 cores or the CB GUI. When the engine loads and you play one move of a game the system will freeze. After forcing cut of the GUI application (Ctrl Atl Del) with taskmanager, the application is still there in task manager and must be manually killed to get system up again. Not sure if it is related to 8 cores or if it is related to the GUI ... or maybe related to Large Pages not being compiled properly as mentioned.

I don't use CB so I cannot directly help with the issue, but it's definitely not related to 8 cores or the lack of large pages. This is most likely provoked by some bad UCI communication between the GUI and Houdini.

Can you send me a dump of the UCI communication that takes place between CB and Houdini?
Thank you.

[Houdini]

Hi Robert,
If you don't want to put in this future version the LP switch (which would be nice) then the LP switch will be to use the new or the old version...
I hope LP now works even with WinXP (64-bit).
How can we see if LP works, and how much LP Mbytes we get (for that, Rybka uses a log, IvanHoe a .txt file)

Ernest,
Yes, large page support will also work in 64-bit XP.
When using large pages Houdini will emit the UCI info string "xxx MB Large Page Hash" instead of the normal "xxx MB Hash".

Robert

[Denzwell]

It seems to have a problem with 8 cores or the CB GUI. When the engine loads and you play one move of a game the system will freeze. After forcing cut of the GUI application (Ctrl Atl Del) with taskmanager, the application is still there in task manager and must be manually killed to get system up again. Not sure if it is related to 8 cores or if it is related to the GUI ... or maybe related to Large Pages not being compiled properly as mentioned.

Houdini must run in low priority under windows system