LearningLemming jumps off a cliff and dies

[BubbaTough]

Unfortunately, the harddrive holding learninglemming source code has been reformatted...shortly after finishing 29/31 in a tournament for young and foolish chess programs.

http://webs.ono.com/smg29/qualify.htm

Now to decide whether my suicidal program should be rebuilt, or is better off dead .

[Pradu]

Unfortunately, the harddrive holding learninglemming source code has been reformatted...shortly after finishing 29/31 in a tournament for young and foolish chess programs.

http://webs.ono.com/smg29/qualify.htm

Now to decide whether my suicidal program should be rebuilt, or is better off dead .

Rebuilt for sure!

[Alessandro Scotti]

It's important to backup on some other media (e.g. an USB key) but anyway formatting a drive won't erase the content and especially in the case of source code you should be able to recover most of the data, unless it has been rewritten (and even then it's still possible, but you'll probably have to ask the CIA!).

[PK]

Your toy finished ahead of my toy. We cannot leave it like that, so please rebuild.

Anyhow, I have had a similar problem a few days ago, and I'm rebuilding.

regards,

pawel koziol

[mjlef]

That is good news, since the second time you write a program it always comes out better. You can restructure the data to betetr suit what you ended up doing. Ask Tord...he keeps starting from scratch and it gets better every time!

[jswaff]

Sam,
I'm really sorry to hear that. Lemming was really coming along - it was only by luck that Prophet held if off last week. By now I'm sure you realize you should've had a backup program in place! Several years ago I lost about three weeks of pretty intense work on a program I was working on (a chess GUI actually). I was so disgusted with myself - but ever since I've been pretty religious about backups (I use offsite CVS now).

I'm not sure what you mean by 'rebuild'. Do you have anything to fall back on? Even if you do, if it is more than a couple months old I would take the opportunity to start again fresh. The rewrite is always faster than the original, and surely in your efforts in the last year you've come across things you wish you had done differently... now's your chance.

--
James

[BubbaTough]

I had a backup, the backup got reformatted (and windows installed over) in the same process that the main drive got reformatted (and windows installed over) . I may have a really old version of the code floating around (probably with hard to find hash table bugs and such) on a USB key or something but I may have to sulk for a while before deciding to go back to that version or start fresh.

-Sam

[Bill Rogers]

I asked the this question in private email so now I will ask on this forum.
Where can I get copies of those low rated engines that were used in Sam's tournement? If they are free or I have to pay for them does not matter. Most of the people on this forum only test or talk about high rated engines. I perfer the underdogs as it were.
Hopefully someone will give me an answer or two or three....
Thanks
Bill

[hgm]

Well, you could ask Leo Dijksman on the WBEC support forum ( http://f27.parsimony.net/forum67828/index.htm ).

The best thing I can offer you (free!) is micro-Max 1.6. ( http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/dwnldpage.html ). I have no idea about its strength; it is a stripped-down version of uMax 4.0 where I removed the hash table to make it smaller. This must also make it weaker, but it never has really been tested by anyone. Even I played a handfull of games with it, to make sure that it could play both white and black, and to show that it still could still beat Toledo easily.

It could be stripped even further, as it still does move 'sorting' by placing the best move of the previous iteration in front. Removing that would probably slow it down enormously. Finally alpha-beta pruning could be removed, after which it would probably only be able to search 3-4 ply. That should surely bring the rating down to below 1000. But as there were no serious contenders for the title 'smallest chess program' that were even close, I decided to keep in those couple of characters, as they were so tremendously important for playing strength. Finally piece-square table and Pawn evaluation could be removed, but then it would start to play so ridiculous by positional standards that it could no longer even keep up the pretense of knowing the game.

[Graham Banks]

Unfortunately, the harddrive holding learninglemming source code has been reformatted...shortly after finishing 29/31 in a tournament for young and foolish chess programs.

http://webs.ono.com/smg29/qualify.htm

Now to decide whether my suicidal program should be rebuilt, or is better off dead .

I was keeping a close eye on the development of your engine and was close to including it in my testing, so I hope you'll rebuild it!