yanquis1972 wrote:good question, after about 10 minutes on my machine houdini at least evaluates it as winning for white but cant seem to find a path --
New game
[d]8/8/3k4/1B3p1p/3K1P1P/6P1/8/3b4 w - - 0 1
After a long search, Stockfish says +3.23 for White, but the pv doesn't seem to show progress.
Houdini 4 uses calibrated evaluations in which engine scores correlate directly with the win expectancy in the position. A +1.00 pawn advantage gives a 80% chance of winning the game against an equal opponent at blitz time control. At +2.00 the engine will win 95% of the time, and at +3.00 about 99% of the time. If the advantage is +0.50, expect to win nearly 50% of the time.
ernst wrote:Let me start with a quote from houdini's website.
Houdini 4 uses calibrated evaluations in which engine scores correlate directly with the win expectancy in the position. A +1.00 pawn advantage gives a 80% chance of winning the game against an equal opponent at blitz time control. At +2.00 the engine will win 95% of the time, and at +3.00 about 99% of the time. If the advantage is +0.50, expect to win nearly 50% of the time.
mwyoung wrote:You are the one claiming H4 makes mistakes
You on crack or something ? Its the OP who was criticizing H4. In my opinion, Houdini 4 will not lose a game in the manner described by the OP, given good hardware, reasonable amount of time and EGTBs.
Is what I'm saying too complicated to understand ?
shrapnel wrote:In my opinion, Houdini 4 will not lose a game in the manner described by the OP, given good hardware, reasonable amount of time and EGTBs.
Is what I'm saying too complicated to understand ?
What's difficult to understand is why you consider that a reasonable statement to make. Given infinite time any engine plays perfect chess.
Was Houdini playing on inferior hardware compared to Stockfish? No. Was it playing at time-odds? No. Was stockfish using EGTBs while Houdini wasn't? No. Was it at a disadvantage from Stockfish? No.
In this particular game (and perhaps under these particular conditions) Stockfish played better than Houdini. Houdini is very strong, but clearly not unbeatable - it misevaluates sometimes and it does miss tactics. That should be obvious anyway, since it would occasionally lose games (to Stockfish, for instance). If that happens more now this is because Stockfish improved and is better tuned than it used to be.
Also fair to remember: Houdini 4 does not improve, it is static. The "current" version of Stockfish has seen an enormous improvement since the version of Stockfish that was current when Houdini 4 came out. Comparing current Stockfish to Houdini 4 is comparing apples and oranges; you should compare with the current development version of Houdini, which no-one has access to (and which may not have improved as much as Stockfish since it's hard to beat the computer resources available to the development of Stockfish, but that's impossible to say for sure).
Should be given something. According to the original poster, the match took place on PlayChess or equivalent. So the machines are certainly not the same. So different geographical location and therefore differente connection. And many other unknown hardware/software optimizations.
ernst wrote:Time and again I see houdini being clueless against stockfish of the danger that is upon it until it is too late. To be honest it frustates me that a €60 engine gets outplayed so often by a free engine.
