Battle of the Goths 10x8 Championship 2009

[hgm]

I just started this tournament on my server. Live viewing of the games is possible at:

http://80.100.28.169/gothic/battle.html

Participants:

Joker80.np
SMIRF 1.75h-X
TJchess10x8 0.121
TSCP Gothic
Fairy-Max 4.8v
ChessV 0.94 (WB)
BigLion80 2.23x
ArcBishop80 1.00

Each program will play each other program 10 times: 5 different opening setups with both colors. We will start with a cycle of Bird's Chess.

Code: Select all

Specs:
Core 2 Duo (E6600) 2.4GHz
PSWBTM + WinBoard 4.20091219

[Spacious_Mind]

I just started this tournament on my server. Live viewing of the games is possible at:

http://80.100.28.169/gothic/battle.html

Participants:

Joker80.np
SMIRF 1.75h-X
TJchess10x8 0.121
TSCP Gothic
Fairy-Max 4.8v
ChessV 0.94 (WB)
BigLion80 2.23x
ArcBishop80 1.00

Each program will play each other program 10 times: 5 different opening setups with both colors. We will start with a cycle of Bird's Chess.

Code: Select all

Specs:
Core 2 Duo (E6600) 2.4GHz
PSWBTM + WinBoard 4.20091219

Thanks for your link it is certainly an interesting and different kind of game.

Also I was just curious about the US Patent at the top of your page. The idea of Archbishop etc is not new and was used previously in historical variants of chess. To what does the US Patent apply?

ps. will you ever consider adding different game times to Winboard... ie 1s per move or even fractions of seconds. With all the increased speeds of computers I am just wondering if this someday becomes interesting.

Thanks and best regards

Nick

[Carlos777]

Gothic Chess is a very entertaining chess variant.

My favorites:

1. Joker
2. TJChess
3. Smirf/TSCP

Regards,
Carlos

[beachknight]

ChessV is the strongest, I'd think. But dont know
the latest improvements on H G and M side.

Best,

[hgm]

Also I was just curious about the US Patent at the top of your page. The idea of Archbishop etc is not new and was used previously in historical variants of chess. To what does the US Patent apply?

The idea of playing on 10x8 with these two new compound pieces is indeed very old, nearly as old as what we now call 'orthodox Chess'. The first reference to it was by Pietro Carrera in 1617, who called the new pieces Centaur and Champion.

It was rediscovered several times, and each time a different initial position was used. The patent purely applies to the initial position. If that is enough to stand up in court is for the lawyers to decide; no one was interested to contest it.

ps. will you ever consider adding different game times to Winboard... ie 1s per move or even fractions of seconds. With all the increased speeds of computers I am just wondering if this someday becomes interesting.

WinBoard already supports fixed time per move (non-accumulating). In old WinBoard versions you could only specify this by a command-line option (-st or -searchTime), and maintaining the clocks was left up to he engine.

The development version (available as alpha version from my website) does fully implement this: it can be selected in the TC dialog, and the clocks are maintaned and displayed by WinBoard.

Sub-second resolution has already been possible for a long time, through specifying time odds. E.g. a time-odds factor of 60 would allow you to specify seconds where otherwise it would be interpreted as minutes.

[Carlos777]

Hi H.G.,

What happened to TJChess? Did you remove it from the tournament?

Best,
Carlos

[Carlos777]

What happened to TJChess? Did you remove it from the tournament?

I notice that TJ is playing again, but what I don't see in the results section are the games that it played yesterday, or is this another cycle?

[hgm]

I had made a mistake in installing the new version of TJchess (0.121) that I downloaded, and as a result, the games played yesterday were played with an old version (0.109).

So I deleted all games, and will replay them. This came up in the other thread in the programmers section, and I explained it there. I also have obtained a newer SMIRF version, and I figured that if I was replaying games anyway, I might as well replay the SMIRF games with this new version too. I started doing that (because they were more games); after SMIRF is done, I will replay the remaining TJchess games. (The games SMIRF vs. TJchess have already been played.)

Sorry about the confusion; I should probably have posted this on the viewer web-page.

[Carlos777]

Sorry about the confusion; I should probably have posted this on the viewer web-page.

Don't worry. Thanks for this interesting tournament. About Smirf, is there any version available to download? I tried with some old links but they don't work.

[smrf]

... About Smirf, is there any version available to download? I tried with some old links but they don't work.

Since people have started to like cloned or patchworked chess engines there has not been any noticeable support of the SMIRF project. Thus I deleted my mostly bilingual web site (no English language chess page has followed this example).

Now there is a small German language only web site: http://www.10x8.net/, where some poems are to be found. Today SMIRF is completely private. The SMIRF project mostly is sleeping. The follow-up project Octopus is alive but is growing even more slowly - from the scratch - as SMIRF has been my first playing chess program and nearly no part of it seems to be good enough to survive.