Taming the Tiger :-)

[Sean Evans]

Rybwhat? Has this thing already been allowed to enter the next WCCC?

As of now it has not been disallowed.

Here are the main characteristics of the strongest engines in the world in the coming years:
- free (as in free beer, not free as "open")
and
- illegal (by Copyright infringment of either GPL code AND proprietary reverse-engineered code)

From now on, no amount of hard work or regulation will ever change this.

Probably, it seems Vas and Houdart have found a niche product involving the copy and paste of other peoples work, then change it enough to make it difficult to tell who's program it is and then sell it, or in the case of Houdini soon to be sold as Houdini 2.0.

If the organizers of the official WCCC manage to get rid of illegal programs, great. I have put my name with many others in support of such an effort. But then people will consider these events as irrelevant because the strongest programs, illegal as they are, have been rejected. Does it answer your question?// Christophe

CT is a competitive program and everybody likes it the same as we like, Shredder, Hiarcs, Junior, etc.; however, the bottom line is Tiger is not competitive as a WCCChampion program. Even the unbeatable Shredder is fading back, so don't feel bad about it!!. It would be interesting to see how Tiger places, probably somewhere in the middle.

On a side note, you might want the Gambit Tiger program setting to kick-in when CT is losing, an aggressive setting often throws human players off their game. It does for me -:)

Take care,

Sean Evans

[tiger]

Rybwhat? Has this thing already been allowed to enter the next WCCC?

As of now it has not been disallowed.

Here are the main characteristics of the strongest engines in the world in the coming years:
- free (as in free beer, not free as "open")
and
- illegal (by Copyright infringment of either GPL code AND proprietary reverse-engineered code)

From now on, no amount of hard work or regulation will ever change this.

Probably, it seems Vas and Houdart have found a niche product involving the copy and paste of other peoples work, then change it enough to make it difficult to tell who's program it is and then sell it, or in the case of Houdini soon to be sold as Houdini 2.0.

If the organizers of the official WCCC manage to get rid of illegal programs, great. I have put my name with many others in support of such an effort. But then people will consider these events as irrelevant because the strongest programs, illegal as they are, have been rejected. Does it answer your question?// Christophe

CT is a competitive program and everybody likes it the same as we like, Shredder, Hiarcs, Junior, etc.; however, the bottom line is Tiger is not competitive as a WCCChampion program. Even the unbeatable Shredder is fading back, so don't feel bad about it!!. It would be interesting to see how Tiger places, probably somewhere in the middle.

On a side note, you might want the Gambit Tiger program setting to kick-in when CT is losing, an aggressive setting often throws human players off their game. It does for me -:)

Take care,

Sean Evans

It's a cool idea. I'll try it.

Thanks.


// Christophe

[Dayffd]

Rybwhat? Has this thing already been allowed to enter the next WCCC?

As of now it has not been disallowed.

Here are the main characteristics of the strongest engines in the world in the coming years:
- free (as in free beer, not free as "open")
and
- illegal (by Copyright infringment of either GPL code AND proprietary reverse-engineered code)

From now on, no amount of hard work or regulation will ever change this.

Probably, it seems Vas and Houdart have found a niche product involving the copy and paste of other peoples work, then change it enough to make it difficult to tell who's program it is and then sell it, or in the case of Houdini soon to be sold as Houdini 2.0.

If the organizers of the official WCCC manage to get rid of illegal programs, great. I have put my name with many others in support of such an effort. But then people will consider these events as irrelevant because the strongest programs, illegal as they are, have been rejected. Does it answer your question?// Christophe

CT is a competitive program and everybody likes it the same as we like, Shredder, Hiarcs, Junior, etc.; however, the bottom line is Tiger is not competitive as a WCCChampion program. Even the unbeatable Shredder is fading back, so don't feel bad about it!!. It would be interesting to see how Tiger places, probably somewhere in the middle.

On a side note, you might want the Gambit Tiger program setting to kick-in when CT is losing, an aggressive setting often throws human players off their game. It does for me -:)

Take care,

Sean Evans

It's a cool idea. I'll try it.

Thanks.


// Christophe

I think that is a cool idea, too. FWIW

[tiger]

Rybwhat? Has this thing already been allowed to enter the next WCCC?

As of now it has not been disallowed.

Here are the main characteristics of the strongest engines in the world in the coming years:
- free (as in free beer, not free as "open")
and
- illegal (by Copyright infringment of either GPL code AND proprietary reverse-engineered code)

From now on, no amount of hard work or regulation will ever change this.

Probably, it seems Vas and Houdart have found a niche product involving the copy and paste of other peoples work, then change it enough to make it difficult to tell who's program it is and then sell it, or in the case of Houdini soon to be sold as Houdini 2.0.

If the organizers of the official WCCC manage to get rid of illegal programs, great. I have put my name with many others in support of such an effort. But then people will consider these events as irrelevant because the strongest programs, illegal as they are, have been rejected. Does it answer your question?// Christophe

CT is a competitive program and everybody likes it the same as we like, Shredder, Hiarcs, Junior, etc.; however, the bottom line is Tiger is not competitive as a WCCChampion program. Even the unbeatable Shredder is fading back, so don't feel bad about it!!. It would be interesting to see how Tiger places, probably somewhere in the middle.

On a side note, you might want the Gambit Tiger program setting to kick-in when CT is losing, an aggressive setting often throws human players off their game. It does for me -:)

Take care,

Sean Evans

It's a cool idea. I'll try it.

Thanks.


// Christophe

I think that is a cool idea, too. FWIW

OK, it deserves a try.

Meanwhile, you are free to test it manually.

One thing I will have to decide is this: if there is little material left, switching to the aggressive mode will not work anyway.

Where should I draw the line? Maybe you can help by testing manually?


// Christophe

[Sean Evans]

OK, it deserves a try. Meanwhile, you are free to test it manually. One thing I will have to decide is this: if there is little material left, switching to the aggressive mode will not work anyway. Where should I draw the line? Maybe you can help by testing manually?// Christophe

One idea would be to have a combined formula for both Material Value (MV) and Eval Level (EL), example:

IF [(MV>15 points) and (EL<-2.00)] then [Goto GT]

Cordially,

Sean

[Dayffd]

OK, it deserves a try. Meanwhile, you are free to test it manually. One thing I will have to decide is this: if there is little material left, switching to the aggressive mode will not work anyway. Where should I draw the line? Maybe you can help by testing manually?// Christophe

One idea would be to have a combined formula for both Material Value (MV) and Eval Level (EL), example:

IF [(MV>15 points) and (EL<-2.00)] then [Goto GT]

Cordially,

Sean

Saw your post about manually trying it yesterday, Christophe and it occured to me this morning that perhaps something like what Sean wrote could be tried. As far as testing manually, would that work, or could it be done? To me it sounds like what you are suggesting is to stop the game at this point, change the settings, then have the game resume. I tried that with "whatever" engine under Fritz 11 GUI and that did not seem to work. Most of the time I am involved with other things while the "chess computer" is running the tournaments, so it would not be really feasible for me to do that. On the other hand, if such a setting were to be tried where I could just let the program run, I would be more than willing to test it at whatever time limits you would like or in a couple (or more) of my tournaments. Those tournaments I usually run with 8 engines, 2RR, each side having 30 minutes per game so that each engine plays 14 games.

[Mike S.]

It's not entirely new. The engine Hossa (which seems to be discontinued since 2006) has a lucky punch mode:

http://www.jakob.at/steffen/hossa/internal.html

"When Hossa has a very bad position but still has enough material to start an attack then he doesn't take care too much about losing more material but rather tries to start a wild attack against the opponent's king. This approach is especially useful in blitz games against human opponents."

(Hossa is private)

[Sean Evans]

OK, it deserves a try. Meanwhile, you are free to test it manually. One thing I will have to decide is this: if there is little material left, switching to the aggressive mode will not work anyway. Where should I draw the line? Maybe you can help by testing manually?// Christophe

One idea would be to have a combined formula for both Material Value (MV) and Eval Level (EL), example:

IF [(MV>15 points) and (EL<-2.00)] then [Goto GT]

Cordially,

Sean

Saw your post about manually trying it yesterday, Christophe and it occured to me this morning that perhaps something like what Sean wrote could be tried. As far as testing manually, would that work, or could it be done? To me it sounds like what you are suggesting is to stop the game at this point, change the settings, then have the game resume. I tried that with "whatever" engine under Fritz 11 GUI and that did not seem to work. Most of the time I am involved with other things while the "chess computer" is running the tournaments, so it would not be really feasible for me to do that. On the other hand, if such a setting were to be tried where I could just let the program run, I would be more than willing to test it at whatever time limits you would like or in a couple (or more) of my tournaments. Those tournaments I usually run with 8 engines, 2RR, each side having 30 minutes per game so that each engine plays 14 games.

What you are describing is Comp vs. Comp games, I do not know how effective it would be against a cold calculating computer, but it is certainly better than waiting for a blunder, which computers rarely make, unlike humans.

One way you can test it is to find an assortment of positions with an eval range of -2.00 to -3.00, then play through with CT and then replay with GT, ensuring learn mode is off on the opponent. A statistically significant number of positions would be required to make it meaningful.

For example if CT loses more games than GT, then we are on to something

Difficult to do this with humans as they have built-in learn mode that cannot be turned-off!

Cordially,

Sean

[tiger]

OK, it deserves a try. Meanwhile, you are free to test it manually. One thing I will have to decide is this: if there is little material left, switching to the aggressive mode will not work anyway. Where should I draw the line? Maybe you can help by testing manually?// Christophe

One idea would be to have a combined formula for both Material Value (MV) and Eval Level (EL), example:

IF [(MV>15 points) and (EL<-2.00)] then [Goto GT]

Cordially,

Sean

I agree with the general formula.

Evaluation below -2 sounds about right.

I'm not so sure about the material value. I guess it must be done by breaking down the material into queens, major pieces and minor pieces.

Gambit Tiger cannot do much without its queen for example.

That's where I could use help from you, the users: here we are dealing with human opposition. I cannot do any automatic testing and would need to play all games myself, manually. This could take a long time and would maybe work just against me, not against other players.

An interesting feature, but that could be very tricky to implement well.


// Christophe

[Sean Evans]

I'm not so sure about the material value. I guess it must be done by breaking down the material into queens, major pieces and minor pieces. Gambit Tiger cannot do much without its queen for example. // Christophe

The Queen is a major piece. Best not to think that way, a computer program can be very aggressive if it has two minors pieces, especially both bishops.

You have to trust the aggressive programming in GT to unnerve human opponents. If you over quantify MV, then [[Goto GT]] will not occur as often and be less effective. Even if there is not much material left on the board GT and CT would probably see similar moves, especially if they both reach the TBs, so a MINVALUE for MV is not overly important; it is the MAXVALUE for MV; i.e. when GT starts and kicks the game into high gear throwing the human into a blunder especially on short time controls.

Any way good luck with your decision.

Cordially,

Sean