Which of the many chess engines in this forum use b strategy ?

[tmokonen]

There are people who are always open for new ways and interesting things.

We dont need another 1000 stockfish clones.

If you're so unhappy with what other people are doing, then do it yourself. You wrote a chess program before. What's stopping you from doing another program in your own way?

[mclane]

I am not a chess programmer. I mainly worked with others testing engines.
And there it was my job to find bugs or criticize things.

Without critical comments no progress. I don't see my comments as personal insults.

I am interested in computer chess as a whole thing. I do speak in general context, or do you see me criticize people ?

If I would criticize in a non constructive way, insulting programmers, they would not have worked together with me, or ?!

The chess programs made big progress in search area, but few progress in the strategic and knowledge area.
The hardware progress often hides the fact that in this area almost nothing has happened.

Example: a few weeks before some people developed a turbokit for 6502 CPUs by emulating the 6502 on a small chip that replaces it.

We tried it out e.g. with ed Schröders
6502 programs MM4/MM5/Polgar/Milano/Nigel Short.

They were catapulted from 5 mhz to 100 mhz.

With this high speed increase the brilliant tiny engines (~32-64 kb code in ROM)
made an ELO jump of 300 ELO.

Amazing, isn't it.
With 8 bit , no hash and no nullmove the fossile engines jump into the area were 68030 CPUs with hash and much bigger rom capacity and ram storage operate.


Hardware made a huge progress in the last years.

[Dann Corbit]

I don't think mclain's criticisms are useless banter.
What they really amount to is praise of the lower tier engines who are working independently of SF, LC0 and other stratospheric engines.
He has a valid point in that clinical precision leading to more and more draws is not exciting chess.
I think the big problem is that he knows what he wants but has no idea how to get there.

And (quite frankly) neither does anyone else fathom that path correctly with assurance.
But the tier 2,3,4,5 engines are already stronger than the titans of yesteryear like Ruffian.
And they try new things.
Some of them are incredibly inventive.

It is not always the 4000 Elo monster that produces moves only Kasparov can comprehend that fills a need.
Sometimes, a breath of fresh air comes from new ideas. Not only that, occasionally a revolution does as well.
Let's pause for a moment and consider Olithink.
It does not give a damn about King safety. You can pile wood around the king until the cows come home and he won't flinch.
Bishop pairs? Who cares?
All the eval terms we know and love are nothing.

And yet, it is about Glaurung strength. That is (quite frankly) absurd and flies in the face of chess knowledge painstakingly coded into most chess engines.

Maybe the incredible focus on mobility by Olithink can teach us all a lesson. Maybe that is (among other things) what is missing from projects like SF.

As an aside, I have a mobility tweak I add to SF which does not increase strength but allows SF to find a category of mates for which it is otherwise helpless to find. I guess that proper application of mobility (see: Olithink) could strengthen every chess engine which does not properly include this important measure. I guess further that once we figure out how to decipher the gigantic node glop called a trained network we will find things like mobility featured in there (along with 100 things we never expected).

We are at a crossroads where we are no longer teaching the engines how to play chess. In fact, they know much better that we do. It is time to start asking them questions so that we can understand what it is that we are missing.

Sure, unsubstantiated. Pure rumor and speculation. Perhaps pure, loggerheaded, leaden stupidity. But it makes sense to me (FWIW).

[Rebel]

Sure.
I am sure there are many others too.

But what do they want ?
Beeing number 1 one day ?
Trying out things ?

Computerchess is science, art, fun, everything.

Not sure to whom you reply, but ProDeo Q3 (-150-200 elo) is all what you are looking for.

[smatovic]

...
We are at a crossroads where we are no longer teaching the engines how to play chess. In fact, they know much better that we do. It is time to start asking them questions so that we can understand what it is that we are missing.

Sure, unsubstantiated. Pure rumor and speculation. Perhaps pure, loggerheaded, leaden stupidity. But it makes sense to me (FWIW).

Good point, now we have "black-box" NNs, when do we start to un-black-box them?

--
Srdja

[mclane]

Sure.
I am sure there are many others too.

But what do they want ?
Beeing number 1 one day ?
Trying out things ?

Computerchess is science, art, fun, everything.

Not sure to whom you reply, but ProDeo Q3 (-150-200 elo) is all what you are looking for.

Thanks Ed. Ed Schröder goes wild in tal attacks.

[Rebel]

Sure.
I am sure there are many others too.

But what do they want ?
Beeing number 1 one day ?
Trying out things ?

Computerchess is science, art, fun, everything.

Not sure to whom you reply, but ProDeo Q3 (-150-200 elo) is all what you are looking for.

Thanks Ed. Ed Schröder goes wild in tal attacks.

What seems like a fairy tale today may be reality tomorrow.

What seems like a fairy tale today was already reality in 1999.

[Dann Corbit]

...
We are at a crossroads where we are no longer teaching the engines how to play chess. In fact, they know much better that we do. It is time to start asking them questions so that we can understand what it is that we are missing.

Sure, unsubstantiated. Pure rumor and speculation. Perhaps pure, loggerheaded, leaden stupidity. But it makes sense to me (FWIW).

Good point, now we have "black-box" NNs, when do we start to un-black-box them?

--
Srdja

I think that this is the golden moment we have been missing, and somehow now we are dismissing.
The one thing I have always wanted from chess engines is to teach me to play better chess.
I really don't care if engine X has a rating of 3875 and engine Y has a rating of 3893.
That means very, very little to me.
While I do learn a little from the constant beatings they give me out behind the wood shed, I wish there were a better way.
Maybe, the Neural networks have discovered some fundamentally new way to consider the chess board.
Maybe it is something that we could understand.
Maybe after we understood it, we could play better chess.
Maybe after we understood it, we could write better chess programs.
Maybe after we understood it, we could write better chess books.
Maybe after we understood it, we could watch a great chess match and understand better what was happening.

Maybe not, especially in my case, but I would like to know.

[JohnWoe]

...
We are at a crossroads where we are no longer teaching the engines how to play chess. In fact, they know much better that we do. It is time to start asking them questions so that we can understand what it is that we are missing.

Sure, unsubstantiated. Pure rumor and speculation. Perhaps pure, loggerheaded, leaden stupidity. But it makes sense to me (FWIW).

Good point, now we have "black-box" NNs, when do we start to un-black-box them?

--
Srdja

I think that this is the golden moment we have been missing, and somehow now we are dismissing.
The one thing I have always wanted from chess engines is to teach me to play better chess.
I really don't care if engine X has a rating of 3875 and engine Y has a rating of 3893.
That means very, very little to me.
While I do learn a little from the constant beatings they give me out behind the wood shed, I wish there were a better way.
Maybe, the Neural networks have discovered some fundamentally new way to consider the chess board.
Maybe it is something that we could understand.
Maybe after we understood it, we could play better chess.
Maybe after we understood it, we could write better chess programs.
Maybe after we understood it, we could write better chess books.
Maybe after we understood it, we could watch a great chess match and understand better what was happening.

Maybe not, especially in my case, but I would like to know.

You know. The best chess engine is 32 men EGTB. All you need is python-chess for movegen. A little bit of heuristic to randomly pick a move that wins/draws/loses. That's like 5 lines of compact Python code for perfect chess engine. That "engine" is really dumb but plays perfect chess. Chess isn't some AI research lab.

In Suicide chess white wins after 1. e3. It's all about remembering PV.

[towforce]

I think that this is the golden moment we have been missing, and somehow now we are dismissing.
The one thing I have always wanted from chess engines is to teach me to play better chess.
I really don't care if engine X has a rating of 3875 and engine Y has a rating of 3893.
That means very, very little to me.
While I do learn a little from the constant beatings they give me out behind the wood shed, I wish there were a better way.
Maybe, the Neural networks have discovered some fundamentally new way to consider the chess board.
Maybe it is something that we could understand.
Maybe after we understood it, we could play better chess.
Maybe after we understood it, we could write better chess programs.
Maybe after we understood it, we could write better chess books.
Maybe after we understood it, we could watch a great chess match and understand better what was happening.

Maybe not, especially in my case, but I would like to know.

This is a fundamental flaw with NNs: there is no easy way to discern what factors are most important for a preference in a particular situation. If you wish to build a system that can explain what the most important factors are in a particular situation, you'd probably be best starting with a different technology.