OICS Seeking New Engine

Discussion of chess software programming and technical issues.

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jshriver
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OICS Seeking New Engine

Post by jshriver »

Long story:

Must admit I'm a bit of a comp-chess nut. As an IT officer, I've built a modest cluster which over the last couple months I've dedicated to my OICS server.

But I've recently saved up enough money and building a semi-massive Xeon cluster which I am dedicating to my OIC project.

Short story:
I will have A LOT of cpu's and tons of memory to dedicate. Looking for linux based engines to add to the OICS project. Windows engines are also acceptable as I do have some windows XP && 7 boxen.

My main requirement or hope.. is that the engines are fairly stable. As you can see from the official list, I have tried many engines, but there are about 10% I've tried that while they work, they are not suitable for 24/7 uptime. They either crash, lock up out of book, or what not.

Think now, I have a solid core engine queue which play 24/7 only needing intervention every couple of weeks or less. But while I do try to play and use whatever I can, fi I need to restart the engine after every game, I sadly tend to brush it to the side.

Willing to dedicate Xeon core's for testing, just need the code :)

Hope this project is useful to at least someone other than myself. Know Wadduuttie has been very nice to play a lot. Matthrew Bradey has also dedicated a lot of his time to my project. In the end I want to offer a service, and a "battle ground" for people just to grind their gears against other engines for testing.

ELO is reported but not concrete, I'm not CCRL. I'm just a place to burn your CPU to see what people have and find strength and weakness.

Which is why from the start I spent so much time just in recording data. I have ever inch of data since inception, and while my code has matured (now including move times). I preserve it all, and in redundancy, to later code can extract what it can.

Always up for recommendations and criticism. Just want to be useful to our cause.

-Josh
jdart
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Re: OICS Seeking New Engine

Post by jdart »

I have quite a bit of experience with Linux engines.

Besides my own (Arasan), I have found the following to be quite stable (by stable I mean can run several thousand games w/o problems):

Spike 1.2 (latest is 1.4 but I haven't tried it), Toga II 1.4 beta5c, Exchess 6.50 (have seen it hang but that is rare), Crafty 23.4/23.5, Gaviota 0.84/0.85. These are moderately strong engines.

Stockfish is also stable and very strong on Linux.

Scorpio was ok but didn't work at the fast time controls I use for testing. GNUChess 5.07 (specifically gnuchess-5.07.170.5b_TCEC) was ok but I took it out of my test matrix because I got a lot of variability in results - I am not sure why.

I have also tried OliThink 5.32, N2, Daydreamer and Redqueen - but had too frequent problems. At one point also I have run Umko (now Minkochess) and Protector - I think also these were not as stable as the others.


--Jon
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Graham Banks
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Re: OICS Seeking New Engine

Post by Graham Banks »

jshriver wrote:I'm not CCRL.....
You are a CCRL tester, but I guess what you meant to say was that this project is unrelated to CCRL. 8-)
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jdart
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Re: OICS Seeking New Engine

Post by jdart »

By the way, I am not sure what your goals are for your cluster but there are lots of chess-related things you can do with a heap of CPU cycles.

Dann Corbit had a project around 10 years ago to run deep analysis over a tree of opening positions and publish the results in EPD format. That was done with engines and hardware of that era. Much better and deeper results are possible now.

You can also use it for game analysis, finding and validating test positions, parameter optimization (CLOP), engine optimization through fast game testing, relative engine rating, or doing as Rybka and a few others do and running a cluster-capable engine on the whole thing for tournaments and analysis.

I don't currently have nearly enough cycles for what I'd like to do and I don't even aspire to do all of this.

--Jon
lucasart
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Re: OICS Seeking New Engine

Post by lucasart »

jshriver wrote: Short story:
I will have A LOT of cpu's and tons of memory to dedicate. Looking for linux based engines to add to the OICS project. Windows engines are also acceptable as I do have some windows XP && 7 boxen.
You can try my engine DiscoCheck 3.7.1. Available (source+linux64+windows64 executable) here:
http://wbec-ridderkerk.nl/html/details1 ... Check.html
It's definitely not a top tier engine, but it's still decently strong (currently 2741 elo CCRL 40/40)
Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.
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Don
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Re: OICS Seeking New Engine

Post by Don »

jshriver wrote:Long story:
Forgive me for not knowing what OICS is. What is it? Depending on what you are using it for I think Komodo is extremely stable.

Must admit I'm a bit of a comp-chess nut. As an IT officer, I've built a modest cluster which over the last couple months I've dedicated to my OICS server.

But I've recently saved up enough money and building a semi-massive Xeon cluster which I am dedicating to my OIC project.

Short story:
I will have A LOT of cpu's and tons of memory to dedicate. Looking for linux based engines to add to the OICS project. Windows engines are also acceptable as I do have some windows XP && 7 boxen.

My main requirement or hope.. is that the engines are fairly stable. As you can see from the official list, I have tried many engines, but there are about 10% I've tried that while they work, they are not suitable for 24/7 uptime. They either crash, lock up out of book, or what not.

Think now, I have a solid core engine queue which play 24/7 only needing intervention every couple of weeks or less. But while I do try to play and use whatever I can, fi I need to restart the engine after every game, I sadly tend to brush it to the side.

Willing to dedicate Xeon core's for testing, just need the code :)

Hope this project is useful to at least someone other than myself. Know Wadduuttie has been very nice to play a lot. Matthrew Bradey has also dedicated a lot of his time to my project. In the end I want to offer a service, and a "battle ground" for people just to grind their gears against other engines for testing.

ELO is reported but not concrete, I'm not CCRL. I'm just a place to burn your CPU to see what people have and find strength and weakness.

Which is why from the start I spent so much time just in recording data. I have ever inch of data since inception, and while my code has matured (now including move times). I preserve it all, and in redundancy, to later code can extract what it can.

Always up for recommendations and criticism. Just want to be useful to our cause.

-Josh
Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventive measure if it were administered prior to the crime.
Modern Times
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Re: OICS Seeking New Engine

Post by Modern Times »

jshriver wrote:but there are about 10% I've tried that while they work, they are not suitable for 24/7 uptime. They either crash, lock up out of book, or what not.
I think the tournaments are stalled right now because of an engine problem.
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Don
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Re: OICS Seeking New Engine

Post by Don »

Hi Joshua,

I assume from poking around that you are running your own computer vs computer server? Sounds like a great project.

Am I to understand you are wiling to host chess programs so that I don't have to run the program locally myself? If so, I would love to send you a Komodo binary to host to run any way you would like.

Don

jshriver wrote:Long story:

Must admit I'm a bit of a comp-chess nut. As an IT officer, I've built a modest cluster which over the last couple months I've dedicated to my OICS server.

But I've recently saved up enough money and building a semi-massive Xeon cluster which I am dedicating to my OIC project.

Short story:
I will have A LOT of cpu's and tons of memory to dedicate. Looking for linux based engines to add to the OICS project. Windows engines are also acceptable as I do have some windows XP && 7 boxen.

My main requirement or hope.. is that the engines are fairly stable. As you can see from the official list, I have tried many engines, but there are about 10% I've tried that while they work, they are not suitable for 24/7 uptime. They either crash, lock up out of book, or what not.

Think now, I have a solid core engine queue which play 24/7 only needing intervention every couple of weeks or less. But while I do try to play and use whatever I can, fi I need to restart the engine after every game, I sadly tend to brush it to the side.

Willing to dedicate Xeon core's for testing, just need the code :)

Hope this project is useful to at least someone other than myself. Know Wadduuttie has been very nice to play a lot. Matthrew Bradey has also dedicated a lot of his time to my project. In the end I want to offer a service, and a "battle ground" for people just to grind their gears against other engines for testing.

ELO is reported but not concrete, I'm not CCRL. I'm just a place to burn your CPU to see what people have and find strength and weakness.

Which is why from the start I spent so much time just in recording data. I have ever inch of data since inception, and while my code has matured (now including move times). I preserve it all, and in redundancy, to later code can extract what it can.

Always up for recommendations and criticism. Just want to be useful to our cause.

-Josh
Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventive measure if it were administered prior to the crime.
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jshriver
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Re: OICS Seeking New Engine

Post by jshriver »

Graham Banks wrote:
jshriver wrote:I'm not CCRL.....
You are a CCRL tester, but I guess what you meant to say was that this project is unrelated to CCRL. 8-)
Aye, meant that the goals are different. While I do keep record of engine ratings the ICS isn't meant to be a place for official ratings of any type.

BTW still working on that 40 gambit.
CRoberson
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Re: OICS Seeking New Engine

Post by CRoberson »

NoonianChess, Telepath and Ares are all very stable on Linux. It is my primary development platform. Also, I can slam a cluster given that I have a distributed version of Telepath which only works on Linux at the moment.