Chris Whittington's Chess System Tal!

[swami]

Thanks for the game, Thorsten. Please we want more!

How many games are you planning to run, Thorsten? I hope it would be no lesser than 10.

looks like CSTal 3 is much stronger.

[chrisw]

[snip]
Did AI Factory acquire all the rights and ownership or did it just licence stuff from the liquidator on a royalty basis?
[snip]

Chris,

I don't know. I just remember when I came across the AI Factory site for the first time it mentioned that they had acquired the rights to some of Purple Software's products, CS Tal being one of them. I would doubt that a liquidator would be interested in a royalty based deal - they generally just want rid of all assets ASAP - even if for $1.

All the best,

Steve

Hi Steve,

Pulling rank here I do know what the liquidator thinks because I'm on the creditors list for about £40,000, so they they keep me informed of their 'progress' every so often; also their charges, I forget how much these are, but liquidators usually charge between £50 and £300 an hour, even logging their telephone calls as time spent. I also discussed buying the assets from them a few years ago. They were very much interested in a royalty based deal.

My problem with all the talk of CSTal2 and 3 is that actually I don't know who owns the code, the executables, development rights, the revenue rights or the name.

Chris

[chrisw]

thats not much. what we would need would be the
64 bit bitboard UCI CSTAL III engine

do you mean the one I wrote that has never been published?

Very interesting that you rewrote CSTAL with bitboards. I remember reading the very interesting debates you had with Bob Hyatt over the usefulness of bitboards in eval. How do you approach the eval with bitboards? Do you still use attack tables? I would be very interested in a version to play against...

I don't think Chris was ever anti-bitboard. He was "anti-bean-counter" of course. Vincent was the "bitboards are no good" poster here...

In fact, he had once mentioned the idea of a secondary bean-counter type engine to win the endgames that CSTal would reach but lose more than it should...

Hi Bob,

Indeed. As you rightly point out, to be anti-bitboard or anti-0x88 for that matter would be plain foolish. These are just different ways to represent the data to the chess engine - I guess the jury is still out as to which one is faster/better since it very likely depends on what the programmer wants to do with the data.

The key to a chess program or to any AI is the algorithms and ideas and concepts that are brought to bear. Bean-counter / intelligence or fast/slow were of course shorthand descriptions for the approach that various programmers took. I guess the jury is still out on which is better/stronger/more interersting etc. etc. If it were all cut, dried and simple then where would be the interest

Best wishes,

Chris

[mclane]

if i were you i would buy your own code back )

and twiddle arround with the latest exe just for fun.
IMO one could still make a new product out of it.

make it 64 bit. make it using bitboard that the profit in speed using a 64 bit compiler and CPU is much, make it parallel in the search.
and than you can be few elo points higher not to be outsearched by the bean counters.

[Michael Sherwin]

Thanks for the game, Thorsten. Please we want more!

How many games are you planning to run, Thorsten? I hope it would be no lesser than 10.

looks like CSTal 3 is much stronger.

Yes, thanks Thorsten!

[chrisw]

if i were you i would buy your own code back )

and twiddle arround with the latest exe just for fun.
IMO one could still make a new product out of it.

make it 64 bit. make it using bitboard that the profit in speed using a 64 bit compiler and CPU is much, make it parallel in the search.
and than you can be few elo points higher not to be outsearched by the bean counters.

Well, the company is scattered to the four winds.

The only people interested were ex-employees of mine, I think they individually did some deals and now own various bits and pieces. It's all too messy for me to want to get involved. Do you know who even owns the rights to use the name CSTal? Because I don't.

[mclane]

[Event "40/120"]
[Site "Intel core2quad 6600"]
[Date "2008.05.26"]
[Round "2"]
[White "RomiChessX64P3k"]
[Black "Bitboard CSTal3"]
[Result "*"]

1. d4 e6 2. c4 d5 3. e3 Nf6 4. Nf3 c5 5. Nbd2 cxd4 6. exd4 Nc6 7. c5 Be7 8. Nb3
O-O 9. Bb5 Qc7 10. O-O Bd7 11. Bd3 Ne4 12. Re1 f5 13. g3 Qd8 14. Bb5 Bf6 15. Be3 Qe8 16. *

I started another game, this time Romi having white.

[ArmoredGuns]

Well, one could hire Jury Osipov to attempt to disassemble CSTal 2

[swami]

Thorsten, any progress so far? Looks like they are almost equal in strength and it's going to be interesting seeing them battle.

Why don't you test them in 40 moves in 15 minutes repeating for a change? and get 10 games quicker, since you have a better hardware already.

[swami]

Come on Thorsten! Where are the games?!

I'm interested in Romi vs CSTal 3(games particularly)... as do many others.