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

[frcha]

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 ?

[zullil]

Just so I'm clear---you have quad-core cpu? And each program is running using 4 threads? And neither is pondering?

[EDIT] I'm asking because my first thought was that Rybka's SMP parameters might some tweaking. I assume Rybka allows you to adjust something like Minimum Split Depth and Max Number of Threads per Split Point?

I don't use Rybka, so I'm not sure what UCI settings it has available.

[rbarreira]

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 ?

You've got that backwards. The real question is why doesn't Rybka hold the CPUs as quickly as it can. The natural behavior is what you're describing from Houdini, taking all the CPU power as soon as it's its turn to move.

[frcha]

Ponder is off for sure...
I was looking at it closely and tt seemed at one point that Houdini was not relinquishing its hold quick enough for rybka to grab it ...but to be honest I am not sure -- I just wondered if there was a possibility to squeeze elos out of something like this.

It looks like on my machine 32 bit 4 core Houdini is about 130 elos superior to r4 at fast time control.

[Laskos]

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

[yanquis1972]

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

dont forget critter. that program will be cheating within the year, mark my word.

[zullil]

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

Some folks are going to take this seriously. Be warned.

[Laskos]

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

dont forget critter. that program will be cheating within the year, mark my word.

Right, I think Critter is already cheating in test suites.

[Roger Brown]

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

Some folks are going to take this seriously. Be warned.

[bob]

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...