bhlangonijr wrote:Don wrote:
It makes me wonder why you include material in your evaluation since mobility also crudely approximates material. Why did you make that concession to simplicity but not others? You don't mind having a program that is much weaker than it needs to be to keep it conceptually simple, but you were not willing to go all the way. I'm not criticizing you, I think it's cool but I still wonder why you chose to do it like you did. For example you could have included a few cheap evaluation terms and added 100-200 ELO without adding much to the program.
Don, I am not Oliver but I think it is an easy question to answer. There are some authors who doesn't have as main goal gaining more Elo points no matter what.
For example, some authors valuates more the reliability of their programs even at the cost of some sacrifice of overall performance. I think Gaviota from Miguel is one of them.
True, in terms of time spent by me, not necessarily the code. Any time I spend on this, is less time I spend on improving the search
Programmer's time is an important parameter that generally it is not consider into the equation For instance, 2 ELO points are important, but not if you spent 1 year coding the change. But I am willing to spent some time in tools or code that will catch bugs or decrease the chances to lose on time etc. If my engine crashes, I take it as a failure, not as 0.1 elo point out of the 999 games it does not crash. In terms of code, for instance, I am not willing to sacrifice a sane long PV for 3 elo points.
I think it is very good to have engines with different priorities. All of them are living experiments with different styles. Olithink shows us how important is mobility. Micromax shows us it is possible to be concise in an amazing way. I think that asking Oliver to add PSTs in order to increase 20 ELO points is like asking HG to increase 20 point of micromax adding 1k lines of code
It is not going to happen, and probably shouldn't.
Miguel
OliThink, Sungorus and Micro-Max are in my list of best chess engines because it seems the authors have the goal of creating very strong and minimalist chess programs. Just to reinforce Olithink is competing with Crafty 10 who has tens of thousands more lines of code.
Well I think we can learn something from that.
I read in some posts that Bob took out from Crafty the fractional plies and all non-check extensions code and his program is doing well. Maybe it really doesn't help much and we are just adding junk code to our programs.
Regards,
