New Engine: PLP

[Graham Banks]

Hi Swami,

can you please tell me some engines that Pinkus is roughly the same strength as?

Cheers,
Graham.

Hello Graham,

around 2100 I think. I'm gonna start a tournament (40/4) including it this night.

Thanks Aser.

PLP is beating KMTChess 1.1 by 4-0 in a grading match so far, so it could be a bit stronger than you suggest.

[swami]

It's not really a slow engine, it does show the pv lines faster which is not very usual for many new engines. It does understand Bishop vs Knight and re-capturing well which says one thing that there's good code regarding the trading off of the pieces.

Regards,
Swami

Hi Swami,

can you please tell me some engines that Pinkus is roughly the same strength as?

Cheers,
Graham.

I haven't tested it against other engines, and I don't have other engines to compare PLP's STS score with, but it scored lesser than Pawny and little around Simplex's scores. Maybe It's about 2200 as per the CCRL.

[Graham Banks]

I haven't tested it against other engines, and I don't have other engines to compare PLP's STS score with, but it scored lesser than Pawny and little around Simplex's scores. Maybe It's about 2200 as per the CCRL.

I've stopped testing PLP because it tried to make an illegal move in 3 games from 7.
If I can contact the author, I'll make the debug files available to him.

Cheers,
Graham.

[Eelco de Groot]

I you have not found it yet, there is a git repository Graham for the code and code changes of PLP. Here is Helge's profile if you want to contact him.

Don't understand much the Seinfeld humour, I guess you had to be there.

From "The big Salad" http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheBigSalad.html

[Jerry's apartment]

Kramer: Listen to this, "If a player cleans his ball during the play of a hole accept on the putting green he shall incur a penalty of one stroke. " That's a rule, Jerry.

Jerry: But it's just a friendly game. Why do you have to be such a stickler?

Kramer: Because that's the way I weas raised. You know when I was growing up I had to be in bed every night by nine o'clock. And if I wasn't, well I don't have to tell you what happened.

Jerry: What are you so worried about this for?

Kramer: You know he talked about Pinkus on the course?

Jerry: He did?

Kramer: Oh yeah, he said he brought a pair of pants into Pinkus' and they came back stained with some kind of dry cleaning fluid. And Pinkus denied responsibility. You see he was very upset with Pinkus.

Jerry: So it had nothing to do with you.

Kramer: Yeah, but maybe I pushed him over the edge.

Jerry: No, I don't think so.

Kramer: Poor Pinkus, poor little Pinkus.

Regards, Eelco

[Graham Banks]

I you have not found it yet, there is a git repository Graham for the code and code changes of PLP. Here is Helge's profile if you want to contact him.

Cheers Eelco. Sending him an email now.

[swami]

The engine is now updated

Hopefully with illegal move bug fixed?

http://www.mediafire.com/?zv4fimi3ney

[Graham Banks]

The engine is now updated

Hopefully with illegal move bug fixed?

http://www.mediafire.com/?zv4fimi3ney

I hope so. I never got a response to my email.

Cheers,
Graham.

[helgefmi]

Woah.. I had no idea this thread existed :-)

First of all, PLP is far from stable, and has a really crappy evaluation function at this moment (it only knew about material balance until just recently).
I haven't played much chess myself, and so I'm mostly interested in the programming part of chess engine programming, i.e. playing with the search algorithms. This will probably change one day (when I feel the search bit is actually stable and correct), but until then, I doubt you'll find much strenght in PLP.

Regarding the bug where it sometimes gave an illegal move (a1a1p), this should be fixed now. It played a couple of hundred games yesterday without any problems; however, I haven't pushed my changes to github since I didn't know anyone was watching :)
I'll do this when I come home from work today, if anyone wants to test the engine.

I never got a response to my email.

Sorry.. I usually check that email account once a month or so as it's mostly used for online registrations :)

[Aser Huerga]

Regarding the bug where it sometimes gave an illegal move (a1a1p), this should be fixed now. It played a couple of hundred games yesterday without any problems; however, I haven't pushed my changes to github since I didn't know anyone was watching
I'll do this when I come home from work today, if anyone wants to test the engine.

Yes, I'd like to test the engine: http://talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.ph ... highlight=

[helgefmi]

Yes, I'd like to test the engine: http://talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.ph ... highlight=

Awsome!
I've pushed the recent changes to github now, but you can download the latest revision from http://ws12.monsternett.no/~helge/plp/ if you don't want to compile from source.
These are compiled in 32 bit, though; compiling for 64 bit should make PLP much faster as it's filled with bitboards. However, the only computer with a windows installation that I have doesn't support 64 bit.