Engines with limited strength

[Odd Gunnar Malin]

Hi.

I will use these holidays to play against (free) engines, where you can set the strength. Does not necessarily need to be the UCI limited strength feature.
What engines are there to try?

My current list is:
Madchess
Arasan
Stockfish

I will probably start with Arasan, I have been using the other two for sparring so I'm used to them.
I will play with slow time controls.
I prefer to play against engines which are in active development in case I have some useful feedback to give the author.
My Fide rating is 1800+ so I will try to use set the engine at that strength or a little higher.
The engine Elo setting doesn't need to be perfect, but it would be nice if it at least scales well.

I will use the Shredder GUI because of the DGT board and clock support, so it would be best if the engine is UCI compatible.

[mar]

Ferdy's CDrill maybe?
https://sites.google.com/view/cdrill/download

[Tibono]

Hi,
I ran a large swiss tournament (64 competitors, 10 rounds); you might be interested in reading the outcome here.

[Odd Gunnar Malin]

Ferdy's CDrill maybe?
https://sites.google.com/view/cdrill/download

Hi.

I may try it, but I didn't see any parameters to set the strength. There is a "sinful" parameter, but in the description it's look as it set the level too low (for my use).
I see an "ownbook" option, but no place to set the book name, should it just be called something predefined?

[Odd Gunnar Malin]

Hi,
I ran a large swiss tournament (64 competitors, 10 rounds); you might be interested in reading the outcome here.

Thanks, this is useful information.
I will put Wasp on my list. I played a lot with Zarkov in the early 90'. Had it even working together with the (dos) Bookup.

I couldn't find the web-site of Chiron, the link I found didn't seem to work. I had this program on my phone some years ago (ver. 4 I think).

I have played a little with the Maia engine, and tried to make personalities alá Chessmaster ( https://github.com/OGMalin/Binaries ).
I also ran many games to see the difference in strength, statistics here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... id=0#gid=0
Now, I only use use Maia on my Chessnut EVO.

[pohl4711]

Hi.

I will use these holidays to play against (free) engines, where you can set the strength. Does not necessarily need to be the UCI limited strength feature.
What engines are there to try?

My current list is:
Madchess
Arasan
Stockfish

Patricia 4 of course. All other engines are just engines... Patricia is the killer-engine. The most aggressive superhuman engine ever created. It is incredible fun to play against Patricia!
Patricia has UCI limited strength parameter and an additional skill-level parameter to limit the strength of play. At least one of these 2 parameters should work in any GUI.
Learn more about Patricia on my website:
https://www.sp-cc.de/patricia_eas_engine.htm

GitHub of Patricia (estimated skill-level Celos can be seen here...)
https://github.com/Adam-Kulju/Patricia

Jim Abletts binaries of Patricia 4:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/0GWGH1T6WG#wXMl5y7fwG35

[Brunetti]

At least one of these 2 parameters should work in any GUI.

Both must be set.

Alex

[Odd Gunnar Malin]

At least one of these 2 parameters should work in any GUI.

Both must be set.

Alex

Isn't this true only if you have a value other than default in both options?
A normal GUI would not send the default value to the engine so this would not be a problem, at least for the GUI's I use (Hiarcs and Shredder).
Looking at the code, it will be set to the last option it gets, so if it only gets one, all should be fine.
Another thing I saw was that only the UCI_Lim.. set the human parameter, it could of course be handled elsewhere, I only looked at uci.h.

I played a game against with the Shredder GUI, but it seems to have some problem with my DGT board, the Rabit plugin shows correct, but somehow Shredder do another move than I did. I need to find another GUI. As long as the game lasted, it played at least not stronger than 1800 as I set it to.

I also set it to run a 3+2 engine match against Hiarcs set to 1800 and for now +9 -16 =2 in favour of Hiarcs so the UCI_Elo without setting the skill works in the Hiarcs GUI.

[Brunetti]

Looking at the code, it will be set to the last option it gets, so if it only gets one, all should be fine.

I tested the Skill_Level setting in Arena, at 1 and 2, and it had no effect. Unless I suddenly dropped by over 1000 points

Alex

[voffka]

Igel has option "Skill" : https://github.com/vshcherbyna/igel/blo ... i.cpp#L156