Next Komodo match: queen for two minors

[Nordlandia]

Maybe they could propose one game and the others normal, just to try

Agreed.

For example Komodo start with one extra pawn and removes his queenside knight.

[JJJ]

Maybe they could propose one game and the others normal, just to try

Agreed.

For example Komodo start with one extra pawn and removes his queenside knight.

I d like to see that too. Also one fun handicap would be to give one more handicap to human, he would have 3 knight but the 3rd on a tough position to reduce advantage.

[lkaufman]

Maybe they could propose one game and the others normal, just to try

Agreed.

For example Komodo start with one extra pawn and removes his queenside knight.

I d like to see that too. Also one fun handicap would be to give one more handicap to human, he would have 3 knight but the 3rd on a tough position to reduce advantage.

I thought of that one myself, but I'm making it a rule to stick with positions that could arise by a sequence of legal moves, however silly. I did violate that when I put king in center without ...f6 played. There are several erasons for this:

1. ChessBase guis don't allow obviously illegal positions, like adding a third knight without removing a pawn.
2. Illegal positions have less to do with normal chess, human players might be very poor at playing them.
3. We have never made any effort to make Komodo play properly with a third knight or more than 8 pawns for example. I'm not saying it would play poorly, but there is a chance it might do so, or even crash. We don't want to spend hours looking at code to check for this. Komodo is only intended to play legal positions.
There are still plenty of interesting positions with this restriction, such as the Black king on e4 with pawn on f6 from which we beat IM Norowitz.

[JJJ]

So let's add a knight for a pawn on legal position

[Nordlandia]

[1. ChessBase guis don't allow obviously illegal positions, like adding a third knight without removing a pawn.

1 - Chessbase 14 don't have this restriction. You can setup any position, even without kings.

3 - I understand that Komodo is only intended for normal chess. Nevertheless, there is so many reasonable odds configurations that make this appealing. My brief testing done in cutechess gui is that Komodo play well with few extra pieces but not more than that.

CuteChess GUI support playing with more than regular number of pieces.

Setup position in Chessbase 14 then copy FEN over in settings in cutechess panel.

[lkaufman]

So let's add a knight for a pawn on legal position

Yes, I thought of this too. It is "semi-legal"; no sequence of moves will produce such a position, but it seems legal to the Fritz/chessbase GUIs since the total piece count is ok and the pawn count does not exceed 8 per side. So it is less objectiobable than others. But it tends to be a bigger handicap than normal knight for pawn, because the extra knight is on the second rank instead of on the bad b1 (or g1) square. Even knight replacing f7 pawn is big; the knight defends the king better than a pawn does.

[Nordlandia]

Larry: consider experiment with CuteChess GUI. It support engine vs human with more than usual number of pieces. Of course you have to manually make human move as before.

Some chess websites allow setup positions with more pieces, simply copy fen into "Tools - Settings - Games"

https://github.com/cutechess/cutechess/releases

[lkaufman]

Broadcast at: http://u.komodochess.com/games/live483.html

Starting noon Tuesday Oct. 10 Eastern Daylight Time.

[lkaufman]

So the final score was 2.5 out of 3 for Komodo, more than anyone in the poll predicted. My impression was that Gilden played pretty well in the last two games but still scored only half a point. His mistakes were not so obvious. It seems that queen for two minors is quite a bit harder for the human than knight odds. It is harder to force even trades, and when you do force them you never get down to less than queen for two minors. But they are still pretty big handicaps, you just have to be willing to part with a portion of your extra material to simplify while keeping enough superiority to avoid the draw. It was a pretty interesting match overall.

[JJJ]

So the final score was 2.5 out of 3 for Komodo, more than anyone in the poll predicted. My impression was that Gilden played pretty well in the last two games but still scored only half a point. His mistakes were not so obvious. It seems that queen for two minors is quite a bit harder for the human than knight odds. It is harder to force even trades, and when you do force them you never get down to less than queen for two minors. But they are still pretty big handicaps, you just have to be willing to part with a portion of your extra material to simplify while keeping enough superiority to avoid the draw. It was a pretty interesting match overall.

It is harder because it is not a full piece advantage.