does houdini3 scale better than komodo?

[Don]

Please let me say why Houdini is stronger than other engines.
Robert is a good chessplayer and knows a strategy of chess. It lets him make a very good static evaluation (especially king danger).
It lets him to use an agressive search too.
E.g. Stockfish's static evaluation is weak and additionally tuned. This tunning makes impossible to change anything. Stockfish gets a high depths, but in many tactic positions returns a wrong way.

I cannot judge Houdini 3 yet but my impression is that Houdini is exceptionally good in tactics and especially attacking the king.

Stockfish is probably the most selective - it has an amazing low BF and in my opinion that may be why you see missed tactics from time to time, but it may also be at least part of the reason it scales so well. I'm not saying it is, we are still trying to figure that out ourselves.

[lech]

Sorry it is my mistake.
I wrote:
"E.g. Stockfish's static evaluation is weak and additionally tuned. "
Thre should be:
E.g. Stockfish's static evaluation is weaker and additionally tuned.

[Zhu.Jianzhao]

As a stupid chessplayer like I am, I have little to say, still I believe all the top 5 engines are beautiful and now komodo and houdini are the top. Stockfish can beat every engine but the attacking lines sometimes are much too optimistic
I think if they are used both for corrispondence chess they are equals.
Houdini is a wizard of chaotic tactical positions, Komodo know a lot of chess, in its analysys I always see when it expoits the lightest weakeness of the opponent, he knows where the pieces, he is a teacher of chess. Houdini 2 was horrible in this , houdini 3 is definitily better in this. The problem of Komodo is know MP and code a little slow. If you improve on this Don elo points come like the rain and still the ELO like the IPON one is a thing that doen't make justice to the engines

the IPON testing condition is 1 thread for all engines, and I don't understand why komodo is lack of MP version.

[Mithu]

Please let me say why Houdini is stronger than other engines.
Robert is a good chessplayer and knows a strategy of chess. It lets him make a very good static evaluation (especially king danger).
It lets him to use an agressive search too.
E.g. Stockfish's static evaluation is weak and additionally tuned. This tunning makes impossible to change anything. Stockfish gets a high depths, but in many tactic positions returns a wrong way.

Remember that Larry Kaufman (komodo co-developer) is a GM and that may be the reason that Komodo plays good chess. Likewise Harvey Williamson is an IM which explains Hiarcs's strength.
I am sure if Critter and Stockfish took the help of a GM they would go off the charts.

[Uri Blass]

As a stupid chessplayer like I am, I have little to say, still I believe all the top 5 engines are beautiful and now komodo and houdini are the top. Stockfish can beat every engine but the attacking lines sometimes are much too optimistic
I think if they are used both for corrispondence chess they are equals.
Houdini is a wizard of chaotic tactical positions, Komodo know a lot of chess, in its analysys I always see when it expoits the lightest weakeness of the opponent, he knows where the pieces, he is a teacher of chess. Houdini 2 was horrible in this , houdini 3 is definitily better in this. The problem of Komodo is know MP and code a little slow. If you improve on this Don elo points come like the rain and still the ELO like the IPON one is a thing that doen't make justice to the engines

the IPON testing condition is 1 thread for all engines, and I don't understand why komodo is lack of MP version.

I do not understand what you do not understand.

In order to have MP version you need to change the code of the program and it is not something easy to do without bugs.

I understand that Don is working on it but he cannot promise when Komodo MP is going to be ready.

It can be next week and it also can be only in 2013.

[zamar]

E.g. Stockfish's static evaluation is weak and additionally tuned. This tunning makes impossible to change anything.

If you think everything in evaluation is already perfectly tuned (which is not true!) then the only way to make progress is to add new evaluation terms.

What's the problem? Would it be good that any 10 years old kid could just
change the numbers in source and improve world class engine?

New good evaluation term is +10 elo, fine tuning it is +5 elo. Evaluation terms are usually highly orthogonal. The fact that existing evaluation is already carefully calibrated shouldn't stop anyone adding new good evalution terms.

Stockfish gets a high depths, but in many tactic positions returns a wrong way.

There is always a trade-off between seeing deeper and missing tactics. I could easily modify stockfish to not miss anything, but the search depth would be around half of what it's now.

There is definetily lots of room for improvement for search algorithm...

But to improve things, you really need to understand what you are doing. Going blindly and just changing some values isn't likely going to give you anything. Is that a bad thing?

[lech]

There is definetily lots of room for improvement for search algorithm...

Without a good static evoluation (a place for strategy of play) it seems to be impossible to get something in search (blind cutting).