Crafty UCI...

[Modern Times]

A great initiative from Steve. If anyone doesn't like it, they are free just to ignore it. Easy.

[Volker Pittlik]

A great initiative from Steve. If anyone doesn't like it, they are free just to ignore it. Easy.

I agree 100%. Crafty was the first engine I fiddled around with except GNUChess. I'm looking forward to play some fun tournaments with it. Against new engines and older ones. Using all options with different books, learning on or off...

Volker

[jshriver]

This is very nice and looking forward to playing it. I cut me teeth in comp chess starting with gnuchess and crafty around 1996 so it has a special place in my heart.

It has one feature I've never seen done elsewhere and used it a lot early in my chess carrer and that was the annotatet command which goes over your pgn game, annotates it, and generates a beautiful LaTeX file. Would love to see something like as a project of it's own.

-Josh

[Peter Berger]

At line 4,311 we see Bob's latest comments, or are these made by some other programmer?

I'd like to convert Bob's last official version of Crafty.

— Steve

This comment is clearly by Bob and shows that, up to the final version 25.6, he was the main author and in charge.

I agree 100%. Crafty was the first engine I fiddled around with except GNUChess. I'm looking forward to play some fun tournaments with it. Against new engines and older ones. Using all options with different books, learning on or off...

Volker

I share your sentiment that this is a cool release.

Crafty's book learner is certainly one of its more sophisticated features—it works. Given how different UCI is from WinBoard, I'd be curious whether the learning functionality still works exactly as intended in the UCI version.

[Steve Maughan]

Crafty's book learner is certainly one of its more sophisticated features—it works. Given how different UCI is from WinBoard, I'd be curious whether the learning functionality still works exactly as intended in the UCI version.

I can't see how book learning could work in a UCI environment. UCI is fundamentally stateless. The engine will never know the results of the game. Undoubtedly, this is one of Bob's criticisms of UCI, and I guess a legitimate one.

— Steve

[Peter Berger]

Yes, this is what I thought.

Slightly OT: some time ago Ed Schröder suggested a new kind of rating list that should include all kind of learning. He entered his own UCI engine, so I suspect it has to be possible?!

[Steve Maughan]

You could extend the UCI protocol to enable learning. The protocol already has a "newgame" command. An "endofgame" command could be sent to the engine with the game result and the moves. It may also need to indicate the side played by the engine.

Most rating lists use their own opening book, so I'm not sure it would be widely embraced.

— Steve

[Steve Maughan]

Crafty 25.6.1 (UCI) — now built on the latest Crafty

A short follow-up to the original release, with two updates.

1) Crafty 25.6.1
When I posted the first version it was based on Crafty 25.2, which I thought was current. It wasn't — Bob had since put out 25.6. So I've rebased the entire UCI conversion onto upstream Crafty 25.6, the latest version. You get Bob's newer search and evaluation work between 25.2 and 25.6, with the UCI layer sitting on top exactly as before; nothing about how you use the engine changes.

The rebase was pleasingly clean — because the UCI code is purely additive and mode-gated, re-applying it onto 25.6 threw only a handful of tiny conflicts, all in the expected spots. It passes the same transcript and perft checks as the first release.

Download:
https://github.com/stevemaughan/Crafty- ... ag/v25.6.1

2) Jim Ablett's compiles are now in the 25.2.1 release
Jim Ablett very kindly produced a set of optimized builds, now attached to the 25.2.1 release — Windows, Linux and Android. That means Crafty-UCI now runs on Android as well (confirmed working in Droidfish and Chess for Android). My thanks to Jim for these.
https://github.com/stevemaughan/Crafty- ... ag/v25.2.1

One friendly note
I know a few of you feel that classic engines are best left exactly as they are, or have reservations about how this was put together. That's an entirely fair position and I won't try to argue anyone out of it — if it's not your cup of tea, please feel free to simply skip this thread; no hard feelings at all. For everyone who's been enjoying running Crafty in their GUI of choice, I hope you like the update.

— Steve

[cpeters]

One friendly note
I know a few of you feel that classic engines are best left exactly as they are, or have reservations about how this was put together. That's an entirely fair position and I won't try to argue anyone out of it — if it's not your cup of tea, please feel free to simply skip this thread; no hard feelings at all.

— Steve

?

This is a forum and not your private/whatsoever mailinglist.
To tell critics to get stuffed is a reasonable reply of course but it might not be observed.

For your doings: I wouldn't have grumbled, if you'd have renamed your fork (properly)...

There are etiquettes you know.

So: Do you care/consider yourself (and the claude-ai) as the new maintainer for this legendary unix-chessprogram?


greetings

[Frank Quisinsky]

Crafty is legendary, and the programmer has a very clear opinion on UCI. We’re making a complete mockery of that clear opinion when we disregard it, and that’s exactly what Hyatt doesn’t deserve. We’re not showing him any respect; instead, we’re saying, in other words: No matter what you did, we’ll do whatever we want with it, not what you once wanted.

It’s been going on like this for quite some time now.
There’s always a very simple way ... to adapt to the level. That’s exactly what I’ve been doing for quite some time now, ever since various things have been made a laughingstock. On TalkChess, cliques are forming, fan groups that have nothing better to do than distort the history of computer chess. Old mens ... the Computer Chess retirement home. When I see it like that, I'm really afraid of getting old.

Admittedly, there are always pros and cons to everything, but we should never ... never ... lose respect for something.

As well-intentioned as it is, and as pleasant as it is for many users to have a UCI Crafty (another name would be more appropriate for a UCI version), I really have a bad feeling about this version.

Then I think to myself ... this is what I’ve been fighting for all these years. The fight for Winboard, for compatibility, for the connection between WB and UCI via Arena, etc., etc. I answered 200,000 support emails during the heyday of Winboard and Arena, only to see the opinion of a true authority - in this case, Prof. Hyatt, being trampled underfoot.

But even worse than this release are, basically, all the jubilant reports. Just how far has this scene come? I can understand why the younger ones laugh at us. Instead of leading by example, we're jealous of their achievements.