Komodo 1.3 Official Release Available

[fern]

GREAT!! And at this time the name must be changed to my proposal, Occam. Komodo made his task, NOW is the Moment for Occam. You see, this name has so many derivations and meanings to any cultured person that know the Occam law about explanations....
I only will purchase only on that condition

But jokes apart, I hope also some kind of original GUI. I know that is not important too many guys here, too much scientifically minded, but to me, a mere writer, it is kind of boring to play different engines under the very same guis, once and again...

Fern

[Don]

GREAT!! And at this time the name must be changed to my proposal, Occam. Komodo made his task, NOW is the Moment for Occam. You see, this name has so many derivations and meanings to any cultured person that know the Occam law about explanations....
I only will purchase only on that condition

But jokes apart, I hope also some kind of original GUI. I know that is not important too many guys here, too much scientifically minded, but to me, a mere writer, it is kind of boring to play different engines under the very same guis, once and again...

Fern

It's been my dream to produce a high quality GUI for computer chess. But I think that is more work than writing a chess engine. If I do it will be minimalistic. I like simple but not too simple. It would have what you need but not millions of obscure features nobody uses (or at least not features I don't use Emphasis on simple and intuitive.

[stevenaaus]

It's been my dream to produce a high quality GUI for computer chess. But I think that is more work than writing a chess engine. If I do it will be minimalistic.

Good luck. I admire RexChess' interface, considering the time it came out, which i suppose was your design.

Shredder's is the best i've seen i think (there's a linux demo). Arena & mainline Scid... what a mess (sorry ;>). But haven't used the commercial ones, so probably they are better.

[Graham Banks]

It's been my dream to produce a high quality GUI for computer chess. But I think that is more work than writing a chess engine. If I do it will be minimalistic.

Good luck. I admire RexChess' interface, considering the time it came out, which i suppose was your design.

Shredder's is the best i've seen i think (there's a linux demo). Arena & mainline Scid... what a mess (sorry ;>). But haven't used the commercial ones, so probably they are better.

ChessGUI is ideal for engine v engine testing. It supports both UCI and Winboard engines, has many tournament modes (including "Team Fight"), supports both Nalimov and Gaviota endgame bases and has the option for automatic tablebase adjudication.

[fern]

One feature that no program implement is a real rating evaluation tool. It is not realistic to be evaluated like a 800 Elo player because you loses every game against an engine even if you played lot of very good moves, proper of a, say, 1800 or more player.
For doing what i propose it is enough with not only take into account the result, but the number of moves that the player did that coincided with the best move calculated by the engine.
So you could lose every game and still to be considered, say , a decent chess player.
We all need that incentive.....

My best and waiting your simple,. intuitive and ORIGINAL gui.
Fern

[Don]

One feature that no program implement is a real rating evaluation tool. It is not realistic to be evaluated like a 800 Elo player because you loses every game against an engine even if you played lot of very good moves, proper of a, say, 1800 or more player.
For doing what i propose it is enough with not only take into account the result, but the number of moves that the player did that coincided with the best move calculated by the engine.
So you could lose every game and still to be considered, say , a decent chess player.
We all need that incentive.....

My best and waiting your simple,. intuitive and ORIGINAL gui.
Fern

With a GUI that is designed for a variety of programs, I'm not sure how to include a rating evaluation tool. To start with it would have to be calibrated against whatever program it was configured with.

What I would like to see for players to improve with is a skittles mode that is customized for each player. After each game the computers level is adjusted slightly upward, or slightly downward depending on the result of the game. This adjustment automatically applies to the next game.

The vast majority of players probably play less than 1500 ELO strength, although this is probably a common skill level for casual tournament players. So the biggest problem is how to handicap the computer in a realistic way. I think Bob Hyatt has some good ideas about how to do that.

The problem is that this kind of support has to be built into the chess engine itself. It would be nice to be able to build it into the user interface so that it just works regardless of which program is loaded.

Your idea of seeing how many moves coincide with the computer is not reliable because different programs play different styles of moves and often there are several perfectly playable moves. However, a compromise is to let the computer estimate how many moves were seriously "below par" by comparing the score of the best move (in it's opinion) to the score of the move you selected and come up with some kind of scoring function for that.

A way to handicap the computers is to use multi pv mode. The user interface could randomly choose the second best move N% of the time. Sometimes the second best move will be an outright blunder. I don't really like that because in quiet positions it may not be much of a handicap and in sharp positions it may be a huge handicap.

I noticed when following on-line tournaments of very strong players with komodo that the humans quite often would play second best moves which would suddenly drop their score. The computer often knew the human missed something, even if it was just positional. So with multi-pv mode that behavior could be simulated. So the rule could be to simulate small errors N% of the time. That might be a way to significantly handicap the computer without it appearing to be too unnatural or fake.

[Trahald]

Don.

Just wondering if you've given any thought to adding Gaviota tablebase support in a future release.

Many thanks for your wonderful engine.

Russell Murray

[stevenaaus]

In case you've missed it, I have to give you's a heads-up to Scidb. Gregor is putting in huge effort and talent into _rewriting_ Scid with Chessbase support. I think a beta will be released late next year. He also has a GUI project (Jessy) lined up to follow.

[Don]

Don.

Just wondering if you've given any thought to adding Gaviota tablebase support in a future release.

Many thanks for your wonderful engine.

Russell Murray

Yes, it is a possibility for a future version, perhaps the next version.

Don

[fern]

Thanks Dan for your detailed answer. Respect to my idea of an evaluator, i was thinking JUST in something of that sort for YOUR engine, not to every engine because of the reason you said.

In my opinion, if in a complicated tactical position the human player choose the best move, that for itself is enough to put him in a certain level of proficiency. If then he play badly missing a more or less obvious move, then you have another criteria to evaluate him. In my opinion -perhaps Larry thinks the same- the fact that makes the difference between a master of any class and a good club player is that this last one is inconsistent, he can play very good moves but then he ruin everything with a silly one.

What is preposterous in any and every case is that an expert level player that anyway will lose almost every game to a 3000 engine be considered a 800 player due to that reason. It is not fair. same for club players, etc.

I like your idea of an engine going up or down in his capabilities according to results. that would be a "camarade" engine, or "Partner".

Finally, and I think we already discussed this, I believe that an engine can be weakened as much as his number of ply diminish. In fact that is probable one of the factor that makes the difference between players. Looking at the PV as I play, I have seen many times that the move I chose was considered good -for me- until ply 5,6 or 7 and then the engine goes on and get the real value of it at around ply 11 or 12 and beyond. What that it means? It means we middle level players does not go deep enough and so an engine, without committing obvious mistakes, can be weakened just in that manner.


My best
Fern