Cerebellum, correspondence chess and me

[Leo]

Ulysses P., what hardware do you have?

[Ovyron]

Ulysses P., what hardware do you have?

Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q8200 @ 2.33Ghz (donated by Paul Watson)

3.0GB RAM (I don't give more than 128MB RAM to engines)

Windows 8 x64

[Leo]

Ulysses P., what hardware do you have?

Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q8200 @ 2.33Ghz (donated by Paul Watson)

3.0GB RAM (I don't give more than 128MB RAM to engines)

Windows 8 x64

OK. I see. Thanks.

[Leo]

Maybe I should stop releasing Cerebellum till the professional Version is ready where everyone can expand the book himself which is the correct way to use it for correspondence chess.
This would also avoid such discussions.

Yes please! May I pay you in advance? Please let me know.

-Carl

One of the things I like about Cerebellum is that it saves your analysis. It seems like a waste when I play matches on the computer and use all that energy and when the game is over, all the calculations disappear. I am looking forward to the full release.

[Ovyron]

It seems like a waste when I play matches on the computer and use all that energy and when the game is over, all the calculations disappear.

I recommend Mike Leahy's Chess Openings Wizard for this.

Unfortunately, it's not as useful as you'd think. Sure, I have all my analysis from the past 10 years in a tidy form, the problem is that when I get to use it, it turns out it's not sound anymore, and I'm able to find much better lines with what is available today.

I don't even think my analysis from 6 months ago is useful anymore

So with analysis getting obsolete in record time, you might as well accept that no matter what, either the calculations disappear or they're not going to be useful in the future.

I use COW's !! symbol for the absolute best moves I've been able to find, that have taken me hours to develop, only to see an opponent play into that position, but after double checking it turns out the variations fall down and I can't rescue them, and the move gets assigned a !? and may become third best...

I wonder how will Cerebellum look 1 year from now, perhaps it'll have a completely different repertoire, as the strongest engines of the year get released and bust its current mainlines. Perhaps we will see the come back of 1.e4!

[mroh]

I don't even think my analysis from 6 months ago is useful anymore

I wonder how will Cerebellum look 1 year from now, perhaps it'll have a completely different repertoire, as the strongest engines of the year get released and bust its current mainlines. Perhaps we will see the come back of 1.e4!

But, all of this is a very normal process!

I play a lot against cerebellum (and other books, you know where to look ^^ ) and they constantly changing lines, even main lines and they have been doing it ever since, even from one release to the next... and all other "living" books do that also...

[Uri Blass]

After you find the losing mistake take the top chess program of the time that the loser play the move and give it 24 hours to analyze

Well, I haven't gone as far as 24 hours, but what I have seen from leaving analyzing the engine unattended for 8 hours (I only do this when I'm not there) is that when I come back it has produced a line that I'm able to refute in an hour, and that either I could have found that best move much faster by using a different engine (you may be surprised how often those moves that take hours for an engine to find, and like, and stabilize to, are found in the first minute of some other engine), or I'm able to find a better line than what was found in 8 hours, with my common, much faster methods.

I actually could produce those "8 hour" moves daily, you know? When I go to sleep my computer is sitting idle, you would think I can let my computer analyzing some move from my game so I get up to speed in the morning.

The reason I don't do it is because I have found it's a big waste of time. The main problem is that you have to refute the 8 hour line at the same relative depth, which takes a lot of time, and the higher the depth reached by the engine overnight, the longer it takes!

And, anyway, isn't this 8 hour analysis that I get equivalent in strength to some 24 hour analysis of the past? Because if back then I used 24 hour move things for my move choices, I'd have made those low quality moves, and 24 hour/move of today is just 8 hour/move of the future (say, of 3500 elo engines).

The secret is that you can get ahead of any high depth analysis easily. At what depth do you analyze? I do it at Depth 28, so if overnight my engine reached depth 36, I can get ahead and refute it if I go to its 6th move and reach depth 28 there, and see beyond its horizon.

Sometimes I get a better PV if I just let the engine reach 28 on every move and let it play 12 plies! And this takes about 12 minutes as opposed to 8 hours! And the 12th ply will be higher quality than the 12th ply of the 8 hour engine!

Perhaps this needs to be exemplified, give me a position where the engine needs 20 or some hours to find the best move, I can show how I'd find that move faster.

At least, I've been able to find the moves of Ed's "Start Your Engines" competition with relative ease and speed (never more than 10 minutes, I think?), and the only time I failed, I sent a winning move, so on real conditions I'd have won the game anyway, who cares if it's not the fastest mate?

Over night analysis usually give bigger depth than depth 36.
Refuting the 6th move of the analysis means nothing because you only need the first move to be correct.

I do not care if the 6th move is not correct as long as the first move is correct.

[Ovyron]

I do not care if the 6th move is not correct as long as the first move is correct.

What do you mean by "the correct move"?

You can leave Stockfish, Houdini, and Komodo to analyze a position for 24 hours, and they might come back with different move choices.

It's like the opening position, suppose one comes with 1.e4, the other with 1.d4, and the other with 1.Nf3.

You can't tell me one of them is the "correct move", and most positions are like this, higher depth only increases the chances that the top move doesn't lose, so basically, you can play 1 hour/move for most of the game, and only use 24 hours for a critical position you'd have lost with 1 hour/move.

The engine will not recognize this, but the human can. A reason an assisted engine will perform better than the unassisted one is because the latter would stick to 24h/move, while the with the former, the human can decide to play instantly on forced moves and use the saved time to play better than the unassisted engine in critical positions.

The unassisted would still waste a lot of time analyzing for 24 hours even when the second best move is 5.00 worse than the best one.

[Uri Blass]

Note that solving problems when there is only one move to win and playing games is different.

The point is that in problems there are often good forcing lines and in a game lines are not forced in most cases so using the computer for many hours per move can help more.

[Uri Blass]

I do not care if the 6th move is not correct as long as the first move is correct.

What do you mean by "the correct move"?

You can leave Stockfish, Houdini, and Komodo to analyze a position for 24 hours, and they might come back with different move choices.

It's like the opening position, suppose one comes with 1.e4, the other with 1.d4, and the other with 1.Nf3.

You can't tell me one of them is the "correct move", and most positions are like this, higher depth only increases the chances that the top move doesn't lose, so basically, you can play 1 hour/move for most of the game, and only use 24 hours for a critical position you'd have lost with 1 hour/move.

The engine will not recognize this, but the human can. A reason an assisted engine will perform better than the unassisted one is because the latter would stick to 24h/move, while the with the former, the human can decide to play instantly on forced moves and use the saved time to play better than the unassisted engine in critical positions.

The unassisted would still waste a lot of time analyzing for 24 hours even when the second best move is 5.00 worse than the best one.

Most of the moves are not forced so this advantage is very small.