A question to savvy people...

[CThinker]

I'm not sure what your question is exactly, but if you replicate the best Toga, then you'll have a program rated way over 2500.

And for that, one does not even have to be a decent programmer.

Btw, I noticed that you avoided the 'c' and 'd' words, and used "replicate".

He's been watching too much Stargate.

Yeah. It looks like it.

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto]

I'm not sure what your question is exactly, but if you replicate the best Toga, then you'll have a program rated way over 2500.

And for that, one does not even have to be a decent programmer.

Btw, I noticed that you avoided the 'c' and 'd' words, and used "replicate".

Intentionally, because I did mean replicate, as in, reconstruct from zero, rather than clone or derive, as in, copy and change a bit.

Completely reimplementing a program like Fruit or Toga is not trivial and will take a while to get everything fully debugged, even for a good programmer. This is why so many programs made after Fruit was published are still not 2500.

I had the impression in previous cloning topics that many people don't realize the above. Adding a few lines to program is much easier than making one from scratch.

The public knowledge is very strong. Most people will be limited by time and their programming ability.

[bob]

Considering the stock or programming tricks and/or techniques today vastly known and that can be implemented in any engine by any programmer decently competent, what do you think is the average strenght you can expect of a any chess engines just made out of those techniques and tricks, no new ideas or visions engaged?
I guess is around 2400-2500.

Fern

2400-2500 means more than half of chess programmers are not even "decently competent".

Thanks, Fern.

Matthias.

Indeed. I consider myself a pretty competent programmer, and am familiar at least with the concepts of computer chess, although I had never programmed an engine until the beginning of this year. I have probably spent about 250 hours on Myrddin right now (less than one of which was implementing the ProDeo opening book code), and I would say that my engine almost certainly doesn't play better than 1600 (although I haven't done any comparison against other engines in a couple of weeks).

And Matt Shoemaker said (elsewhere in this thread) that a "single long coding session" would be enough to make a 2000+ engine. Clearly, that is for somebody who has done it before, and I still not sure if I believe it.

Then again, maybe I'm not competent?

jm

I believe experience is more important that knowledge/skills. Once you write a chess engine, starting from scratch is much less overwhelming. I put the first version of Crafty together in less than a week of non-full-time programming. It started off on ICC at beyond 2000 and was at 2200 within a week or two after that. However, ratings then and now are different, and back then 2500 was a tough challenge as that is where most of the GM players were.

But for me, starting from scratch would be different than for someone that has not yet written a chess engine or two. I'd already know how I intended to represent the chess board, how to deal with hashing, null-move, move generation, evaluation, etc... That is a huge start... And, in fact, there is more effort in choosing those than in implementing them. Once you have done it a couple of times previously.

[Roman Hartmann]

If you really need to have a strong engine in short time you could just take one of the strong open sourced engines and take it as a role model for your own engine. You would certainly reach about 2700 or so. An advanced programmer newbie could probably do that. If you can read and understand source code you can do that.

But doing something like that would mainly be dull work and probably not very satisfying as you're only copying ideas.

Roman

PS: But on a remote island without www access and only a computer, a compiler and no source of a third party engine stored on the computer only few progammers would probably be able to write a >2000 engine if they hadn't done so before.

[Edsel Apostol]

I agree with Bob here. No matter how good you are in programming if you are not familiar with the theory or you have no experience, it would be hard even to reach 2500.

I know that there are some professional programmers here, and others have some masters degree already but there engine is still at the 2200 level.

As Gian-Carlo states even trying to imitate Fruit would not give you a 2800 rated engine as you will need a lot of time to check that your code works as expected.