What is strongest Rybka 4? -- and is Houdini cheating ?

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Dr.Wael Deeb
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Re: What is strongest Rybka 4? -- and is Houdini cheating

Post by Dr.Wael Deeb »

Laskos wrote:
Post subject: What is strongest Rybka 4? -- and is Houdini cheating ?
Houdini is cheating by launching dormant processes during its turn, which activate during opponent's turn. I checked that on various hardware, always the same. Just look at how sloppy Houdini plays without cheating. Rybka 4 is by far the strongest engine (btw IvanHoe is also cheating, Robbolito is massively cheating, soon Stockfish will cheat too).

Kai
:lol:
_No one can hit as hard as life.But it ain’t about how hard you can hit.It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.How much you can take and keep moving forward….
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Houdini
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Re: What is strongest Rybka 4? -- and is Houdini cheating

Post by Houdini »

Charles,

It is very much the expected behaviour that the engine immediately activates all the threads when it gets a "go" instruction.

It is equally expected that in rapid 0+4s matches Houdini 1.5 convincingly beats Rybka 4 or Ivanhoe, 75 Elo points difference is about correct in my experience. I'm not aware of any Rybka 4 settings that would signficantly improve its match results against Houdini 1.5.

Cheers,
Robert
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Dr.Wael Deeb
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Re: What is strongest Rybka 4? -- and is Houdini cheating

Post by Dr.Wael Deeb »

Houdini wrote:Charles,

It is very much the expected behaviour that the engine immediately activates all the threads when it gets a "go" instruction.

It is equally expected that in rapid 0+4s matches Houdini 1.5 convincingly beats Rybka 4 or Ivanhoe, 75 Elo points difference is about correct in my experience. I'm not aware of any Rybka 4 settings that would signficantly improve its match results against Houdini 1.5.
Cheers,
Robert
The poor Rybka fanboys made tons of testing to find such settings and it all ended with massive failure....
When I needed a good amoint of laughing,I go to their sacred forum and watch their fruitless efforts....
Dr.D
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Re: What is strongest Rybka 4? -- and is Houdini cheating

Post by zullil »

Seems like a good moment to lock this thread. :D
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Dr.Wael Deeb
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Re: What is strongest Rybka 4? -- and is Houdini cheating

Post by Dr.Wael Deeb »

zullil wrote:Seems like a good moment to lock this thread. :D
Why,aren't we having fun :lol: :?:

:wink:
_No one can hit as hard as life.But it ain’t about how hard you can hit.It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.How much you can take and keep moving forward….
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Re: What is strongest Rybka 4? -- and is Houdini cheating

Post by frcha »

Houdini wrote:Charles,

It is very much the expected behaviour that the engine immediately activates all the threads when it gets a "go" instruction.

It is equally expected that in rapid 0+4s matches Houdini 1.5 convincingly beats Rybka 4 or Ivanhoe, 75 Elo points difference is about correct in my experience. I'm not aware of any Rybka 4 settings that would signficantly improve its match results against Houdini 1.5.

Cheers,
Robert
Thanks for your reply.. Yes, it does look like expected result -- though I am getting +120 elo at least. I will post the results when its complete just a 20 more games to go.
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Houdini
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Re: What is strongest Rybka 4? -- and is Houdini cheating

Post by Houdini »

frcha wrote:Thanks for your reply.. Yes, it does look like expected result -- though I am getting +120 elo at least. I will post the results when its complete just a 20 more games to go.
The Elo difference I quoted was for the 64-bit version, with 32-bit the Elo difference is probably somewhat larger - Houdini is very well optimized for 32-bit, Rybka 4 not so much.

Robert
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Re: What is strongest Rybka 4? -- and is Houdini cheating

Post by Werewolf »

bob wrote:
frcha wrote:I am having some strange results in my engine vs engine tournaments without houdini 1.5 - rybka 4 seems very strong -- it is about even to ivanhoe over a long series of games -- at time control of 0+4s I use this control to offset any possible bugs in arena and also to possibly make R4 stronger since supposedly you need to change their settings to make it perform better.

Are there known proven to be stronger parameters for R4 in testing eng vs eng for various types of time controls?

Now when I started playing Houdini vs R4 -- I am getting very lopsided results -- it totally demolishing R4 up to 130elos!!! Its not doing so well against the latest stockfish only up by 50 elo. I am playing a 100 game gauntlet match of H vs R4 and H vs SF 2.01
Its ponder = off and 0+4s and with the silver suite.

Is it possible for an engine to gain an advantage by simply being able to grab most of the cpu and hold on for just a tad longer? I notice from the task manager than when its houdini's turn to play - it grabs the cpu usage to 99 very quickly while Rybka 4 each process takes a little longer to reach 25 (4 cpu) .
Its probably nothing but can anyone chime in with this? Can an engine actually gain elo from these types of matches by taking hold of the cpu quickly ?
If you use the same machine to play both engines, there is lots of room for mischief. When I was a grad student, we had an othello tournament for a class project. I did a parallel search, and used N threads on a single-core machine. If I set N = 10, where my opponent did not do a parallel search, I would get about 90% of available computing cycles, or I ran about 10x faster than he did. And this was ponder=on (for those [not many] that did pondering). So yes, you can play games.

If you do ponder = off, I would be temped to do a normal search, then spawn 100 threads while waiting on my opponent, giving him 1% of the CPU. :)

Linux is a bit smarter, because of thread groups, but it would still let me steal a lot of time from my opponent, which would hurt its speed and bias the results.

With all the copying going on, nothing would surprise me with respect to this group of "cousins" at the top of the list. you just get what you get...
If testing was done on two separate computers and still maintained the same elo difference between Houdini and Rybka then that would suggest there is no cheating going on.

I have just started such a match and Houdini is winning easily. Unfortunately I don't know which GUI is the easiest to do this in an automated way - contacted Chessbase this morning but they said Fritz 12 GUI wasn't the answer. Is there a really simple way?
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Re: What is strongest Rybka 4? -- and is Houdini cheating

Post by Houdini »

Werewolf wrote:If testing was done on two separate computers and still maintained the same elo difference between Houdini and Rybka then that would suggest there is no cheating going on.
There is no cheating going on.
Even on a single computer you can easily establish the following via the Task Manager by displaying the Threads and Total CPU time columns:

1) Unlike most other programs, Houdini always uses the exact number of threads that is requested. If you have specified Threads=4, you'll find exactly 4 threads running in the Task Manager. There are no idle threads that could steal CPU from the opponent.

2) The CPU total time in the Task Manager will correspond perfectly to the time that has elapsed on the GUI clock. If the program has used 20 seconds in the GUI, and 4 threads are running, the total CPU time will be very close to 80 seconds.

3) Very often, the total CPU time of other engines will be higher than Houdini's. As far as I know, Houdini is more conservative in its time usage than for example Stockfish or Ivanhoe.

Robert
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Sylwy
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Re: Why not ?

Post by Sylwy »

Laskos wrote:
Rybka 4 is by far the strongest engine (btw IvanHoe is also cheating, Robbolito is massively cheating, soon Stockfish will cheat too).

Kai
Hey man !

I cheat also !
Please modify your list !

:roll: S :roll: