CCCP - bad joke strikes back

[PK]

If an engine is called CCCP, there are approximately two good release dates: April the 1st and May the 1st. Today is the latter, so check for the latest download under the link

www.marittima.pl/cccp

This month I took my last pre-PHD exams. Good news is that after the 10th of June I will be able to talk with gravitas and authority like dr Hyatt (if I only omit an escape clause that my research focused on the XIIth century chronicles). The bad news is that I didn't have much time for chess programming. After a short break I found out that understanding a Hopeless code became a hopeless case, so I focused on learning C by the means of writing CCCP and trying to make it even cleaner than the original.

The recent developements are:

- main hashtable (the logic seems to be OK, but the keys are only 32-bit, so I guess fixing it it's the next task)
- a couple of eval tweaks, dealing mostly with the king safety
- killer move heuristics changes
- deleting some prunings that do not work (now I have the null move, futility and delta pruning)

In the process I re-discovered an old invention of mine - a rule that says: if the King is on G1 and bishop on F1, then consider the bishop developed.

I think that the current version is close to breaking the 2000 Elo barrier.

regards,

Pawel Koziol

[Tony Thomas]

Pawel, wouldnt you rather have us play with Hopeless instead??

[PK]

the problem is that I got stuck with Hopeless. I have a version with a couple of minor changes waiting for the release, but I cannot get a real improvement since 0.49. just small tweaks here and there: time management, mobility scoring etc. But the damn thing is too slow to become copetitive and too buggy for trying to be clever instead (though I like watching its unsound attacks).

The main problem with Hopeless is that writing it I was simultaneously learning to program (before embarking on chess programming I had only a 5-in-line program working). In short, Hopeless needs a complete rewrite. I am tempted to start it from scratch in C, but I need to know a little bit more about C first. that's the real reason behind making bad jokes.

[Ovyron]

The logo:

(PNG)


(JPG)

[GenoM]

It's one of the most stylish logo's I've ever saw.
Congratulations!

[Tony Thomas]

I played few games with Brainless, its still much weaker than Hopeless, so I figured that Hopeless is your main engine. Are you saying that you would rather have CCCP in a tournament??

[Tony Thomas]

Since I ranted the last time you posted this thing thinking it was a creative April Fool's joke, I will play few games with it as sort of an apology. I will post the results on this thread tomorrow.

[PK]

Tony,

Hopeless is indeed my main engine, but for the time being I don't know how to develop it further. It deserves a rewrite, but I am trying to get some new experiences before that.

I started CCCP at the time when I had no access to my Borland Delphi compiler - this is kind of fixed now, but after taking a shot at C programming I find Delphi a bit too verbose.

CCCP scores about 40% at blitz against Hopeless right now. Since it has completely different eval, games are very instructive to watch, as both engines do find each other's weak spots. So Hopeless is better and much more fun to watch, but I expect it to be overtaken in a moonth or so.

As far as Brainless is concerned - the project is in its infancy, and my contribution is only about eval function. The version which is publicly available is not the recent one - it lacks the King safety code among other things.

Hope this clears things up,

Pawel Koziol

[Ovyron]

It's one of the most stylish logo's I've ever saw.
Congratulations!

Thanks

[PK]

Thank You for the logo! So it was possible to come up with something different than a red flag, a red tank etc.