Battle of the Goths 2012 (live broadcast)

[hgm]

Final standings of the playoffs:

Code: Select all

Cross table, sorted by score percentage, Buchholz, SB

                              Biha Spar TJch Nebi Joke SMIR tscp
 1. Bihasa v                  #### 1111 1111 1111 1=01 =111 1111
                              #### 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111   96%  46.0 (976.0, 934.3)

 2. Spartacus                 0000 #### 1011 10=1 0101 1101 1111
                              0000 #### 1000 1110 1101 1100 1111   57%  27.5 (1124.0, 472.3)

 3. TJchess                   0000 0100 #### 1011 1111 1111 1111
                              0000 0111 #### 1000 0100 101= 1111   57%  27.5 (1124.0, 457.3)

 4. NebiyuChess               0000 01=0 0100 #### 1101 0111 0011
                              0000 0001 0111 #### 0101 1111 1111   51%  24.5 (1148.0, 425.3)

 5. Joker                     0=10 1010 0000 0010 #### 1111 0111
                              0000 0010 1011 1010 #### 011= 0111   48%  23.0 (1160.0, 431.8)

 6. SMIRF MS                  =000 0010 0000 1000 0000 #### 0111
                              0000 0011 010= 0000 100= #### 1111   30%  14.5 (1228.0, 240.8)

 7. tscpgothic                0000 0000 0000 1100 1000 1000 ####
                              0000 0000 0000 0000 1000 0000 ####   10%   5.0 (1304.0, 109.5)

Bihasa has won this tourney in the most convincing way! The battle for second place was thrilling: Spartacus seemed to have a comfortable lead on TJchess10x8, but in the last cycle lost twice against outsider SMIRF (always dangerous, and one of the two engines that scored against all opponents!) In addition it lost twice to TJ, and this was enough for TJ to grab second place in the last round, if it would have defeated SMIRF twice. But in the very last game of the tourney, SMIRF managed to draw by a perpetual from a very bad position, thus creating a tie between Spartacus and TJ. Sonnenborn-Berger points decide this tie in favor of Spartacus.

I have now started a multi-gauntlet with Heretic 0.3 and Sjaak 470, the fixed versions of the engines for which the fix came too late to qualify for the playoffs. They will unofficially play against the playoff participants.

[smrf]

Thank you for performing this 10x8 tournament!

Next year maybe the number of participants is doubling again.

[mar]

Thank you for the tourney hgm and congratulations to the World champion Ferdy Mosca and Bihasa! I hope the Shannon trophy is on its way already.

Martin

[George Tsavdaris]

Isn't this the same for normal chess if you let engines play without opening book?

No. Todays Chess engines of course without opening book they play much much worse the opening, but they play very sensible and good moves overall. Not all times of course.
10x8 CRC engines on the other hand, play terribly.
And i mean terribly.

I would be very interested in seeing some more discussion/suggestions for improving engine opening play (without an opening book), but it's hard to find anything.

•Play Pawn moves first, that open the long diagonals for Bishops.
•Develop your Knights before you develop your Archbishop/Chancellor and Queen.
•Create a skeleton of Pawns before moving the Chancellor and Archbishop and the Queen.
•NEVER(ok almost never) develop Chancellor or Archbishop in the 3rd(6th for black) rank in the opening. Usually it's bad. 2nd(7th) row is always the best. (of course that doesn't mean the first move of A or C should not be on 3rd rank. No. It means that in the opening phase they should not be placed there. But if the position is more advanced and the characteristics of it, i.e the skeleton of Pawns is well defined and the other pieces have been developed, then if a good square for A or C is in the 3rd rank, then yes you should place it there of course)

•Be aggressive on the center and don't let the opponent to dominate it.
•Bishop's development should not be rushed. They can wait.

The general rule of course is avoid playing a piece twice in the opening.

Note of course, that if the opponent plays badly in the opening and you can gain something from that, by breaking the above rules, you should do it by all means and break the rules.

[Evert]

No. Todays Chess engines of course without opening book they play much much worse the opening, but they play very sensible and good moves overall. Not all times of course.

Is this because they tend to search deep enough to reach a middle-game position, where they have some idea for whether pieces are well-placed or not?
Or is there some other reason?
For chess variants the evaluation is not as good as for normal chess engines, so that certainly doesn't help.

•Play Pawn moves first, that open the long diagonals for Bishops.
•Develop your Knights before you develop your Archbishop/Chancellor and Queen.
•Create a skeleton of Pawns before moving the Chancellor and Archbishop and the Queen.
•NEVER(ok almost never) develop Chancellor or Archbishop in the 3rd(6th for black) rank in the opening. Usually it's bad. 2nd(7th) row is always the best. (of course that doesn't mean the first move of A or C should not be on 3rd rank. No. It means that in the opening phase they should not be placed there. But if the position is more advanced and the characteristics of it, i.e the skeleton of Pawns is well defined and the other pieces have been developed, then if a good square for A or C is in the 3rd rank, then yes you should place it there of course)

•Be aggressive on the center and don't let the opponent to dominate it.
•Bishop's development should not be rushed. They can wait.

The general rule of course is avoid playing a piece twice in the opening.

That's all very hard to translate into an algorithm.
I guess what's needed is a combination of two things: evaluation and move ordering. I notice that if I just put things like "develop your knight before your queen", then the program will happily develop its queen first because it thinks it can develop its knight afterwards anyway and then it's back to the situation where both have been developed.

In Sjaak, I currently give a penalty for pieces that have not been developed, a penalty for not having castled (but being able to) and a larger penalty for not having castled and no longer being able to. This at least gets it to move its pieces out and stick its king in the corner.

I can try the following: in the opening, sort pawn moves to the centre higher up in the move list, they're probably good. Sort development moves of minor pieces higher than those of heavy pieces. When developing heavy pieces, favour moves that keep them "behind the lines" (so don't place them before the pawns). Perhaps also increase the weight of the centre in the evaluation until most pieces have been developed to encourage pieces to control the centre.
Does this sound like a reasonable thing to try?

[TonyJH]

Thanks for running this tournament HG! Congrats to Ferd!
It's interesting that the previous champion Joker80 came in 5th place this time, although it was not far at all from the 2nd through 4th place programs.
I hope there are more tournaments like this in the future.

[Ferdy]

Thanks hgm for running the tourney, and the efforts developing many variants, and of course the further development of winboard.
I promise to develop it further for next year's championships .

[Ferdy]

Thank you for the tourney hgm and congratulations to the World champion Ferdy Mosca and Bihasa! I hope the Shannon trophy is on its way already.

Martin

I was surprised with 1 lose and 2 draws . I will send the trophy to you as soon as I received it I heard you will participate with a monster next year .

[Ferdy]

•Play Pawn moves first, that open the long diagonals for Bishops.

With bishop mobility engines can do this without other special codes, I guess most engines have this. I also have pawn and bishop color scoring, if I have only 1 bishop, would try to put some pawns in the dark board color in the middle game if I have a white bishop. This would also protect weak square with the missing bishop color.

•Develop your Knights before you develop your Archbishop/Chancellor and Queen.

I solved this by tweaking the piece square tables penalizing the first rank of minor pieces (B and N). I don't know if this is optimal.

•Create a skeleton of Pawns before moving the Chancellor and Archbishop and the Queen.

In my test, encouraging placement of heavy piece behind own pawn works. I don't know what pawn structure turned out. But I can see a somewhat improved pawn and pieces coordination, yeah because by placing the pieces behind it will not obstruct the path of the pawns. you will get surprised also that when the advanced pawns were exchanged, the rooks, queen and chancellor are already positioned and will be scored when you have heavy pieces in half-open file or in full open file when opp has no pawns also. If program will put pieces in front of own pawns there might be tactical situation that it tries to solved.

•NEVER(ok almost never) develop Chancellor or Archbishop in the 3rd(6th for black) rank in the opening. Usually it's bad. 2nd(7th) row is always the best. (of course that doesn't mean the first move of A or C should not be on 3rd rank. No. It means that in the opening phase they should not be placed there. But if the position is more advanced and the characteristics of it, i.e the skeleton of Pawns is well defined and the other pieces have been developed, then if a good square for A or C is in the 3rd rank, then yes you should place it there of course)

I guess my point above will solve this.

•Be aggressive on the center and don't let the opponent to dominate it.

One idea here is use pawn as much as possible to attack the center.

•Bishop's development should not be rushed. They can wait.

This is difficult, perhaps when engine has many eval features, the bishop will not attack on his own.

The general rule of course is avoid playing a piece twice in the opening.

I see a situation like this where a bishop moves to weaken the pawn structure of opp and then goes back to its orig square, maybe this is forgivable.

Thank you for the comments george.

[mar]

I was surprised with 1 lose and 2 draws . I will send the trophy to you as soon as I received it I heard you will participate with a monster next year .

Surprised? Well at least it is possible to score against your monster! Lol I doubt that i will have anything competitive But in the case you get the trophy I will send you my address
Seriously amazing performance so congrats again and enjoy being world #1 in 10x8!