TEST position TCEC5- Houdini 1.03a-DRybka4 1-0

[zullil]

Jeroen,

Look at the very fine game of chess presented by Bram. Compare the evaluations and the ponder moves. Consider whether Rybka has correctly evaluated the trapped bishop, and whether Houdini has done so.

Curiously, over the last 18 months you have made exactly 4 posts at Talkchess, and every time your *only* goal appeared to be to denigrate Houdini or other competitors of Rybka.
Surely a prominent member of the Rybka team can make better contributions to Talkchess than just trash-talking Houdini.

Robert

Surely the most prominent member of the Houdini team could decide to release the engine's source code.

Or, perhaps you would be willing to release the source code of some of the four or five other engines you have created?

Here's some of my background:
- I'm a professional software developer.
- I'm also (or at least, have been...) a reasonably strong OTB chess player, with a peak rating of 2280, and have played more than 15 years of competitive chess up to the year 2000.
- I've had an interest in chess engines since 1984, as a teen-ager I've spent many hours looking at Richard Lang's Psion chess - what a great piece of code that was!
- Over the years I have written 4 or 5 engines in different programming languages (assembler, Pascal, C), without publishing any of them.

[Houdini]

Surely the most prominent member of the Houdini team could decide to release the engine's source code.

Houdini is completely free but currently not open source.

Or, perhaps you would be willing to release the source code of some of the four or five other engines you have created?

If you're really interested, send me an e-mail at rh(at)cruxis.be, and I will return you some assembler and Delphi chess programs I wrote in the past.

[Damir]

Release the source code, now why would he do that ? If he can/wants to improve the engine on his own, there is no need to release the source. It is his engine after all, and he can decide whatever he wants to do with it...
I highly doubt any commercial engine authors out there would say even thanks, but would just copy and paste what they find in his improvements into their engine. Is this really what you are suggesting him to do ?

[Damir]

There are plenty of other open source engines Robbolito, Ivanhoe, SF etc..
If you are looking for improvements like copy&paste, I think you should look into their source.

[beram]

The settings might have affected Rybka, but if you look at a bunch of Rybka 4 losses, you will find that many of them are due to not giving a drop in evaluation for blocked bishops or "bad" bishops. As for Ivanhoe and Houdini evaluating differently than Rybka ... they simply don't and evaluate almost identical to Rybka 3. Of course they have some changes and modifications, but essentially they are all based on Rybka 3 with some improvements and bug fixes. The biggest difference I can see is that they are thread based engines rather than process based.

Dear M. Ansari, you haven't read or don't agree on BB+ report published by Zach Wegner ?
http://www.open-chess.org/viewtopic.php ... =110#p1220
Respectable programmers as Ed Schroder and Chris Wittington have said that this report proves that Ippolit is not a Rybka clone

to quote BB:
..Ironically, it was M ANSARI who kept on saying (essentially) that when I dug deeper into it I would find more evidence of cloning...

[Milos]

Surely the most prominent member of the Houdini team could decide to release the engine's source code.

Lol. So Rybka not first any more, Vas utterly lacking ideas, no more free source to "go back and fourth and pick up few things", pretty desperate situation, so you decided to help with your "smart" suggestion. How convenient that would be.
Go to Rybka forum and suggest the same thing to Vas. He doesn't have to release R4 sources, he can only release Rybka 1 so we all can be finally convinced how R1 is different than Fruit .

[Milos]

As for Ivanhoe and Houdini evaluating differently than Rybka ... they simply don't and evaluate almost identical to Rybka 3. Of course they have some changes and modifications, but essentially they are all based on Rybka 3 with some improvements and bug fixes. The biggest difference I can see is that they are thread based engines rather than process based.

Of course Rybka engines have some changes and modifications, but essentially they are all based on Fruit with some improvements and many new bugs introduced. The biggest difference I see is that they are bitboard based engines rather than 0X88 (or 16x16) based.

[Martin Thoresen]

These are a few quotes from Robert Houdart,

Thanks for the report, Martin!
version 1.03a to 1.5 that's quite a jump...

By the way, why did you include the feeble Arasan in your current tournament?

Well, why is snow white?

No seriously, it was included because I wanted it to be included. Variation.
Not that many engines supports 6 threads and are 64-bit and are of
"reasonable" strength. I don't think Arasan's 0 score was deserved. It
played like a hero and should have been granted at least a draw.
It actually made two draws in my initial testing tournament (rapid) vs
the same opponents.

In "official" computer chess events programs of all ELO-strength can participate, so why not in TCEC?

There are only so many variations I can do with the top engines until it gets repeating.

PS: Don't turn this thread into a Rybka/Fruit/Source code thread.

[Roger Brown]

Apparently you are a very angry man, having no problems with Rybka derivatives (even promoting them), which are 90% more closer to Rybka than Rybka to Fruit

In the mean time your posting is completely missing my point, which was to answer mr Houdarts claim that Houdini is playing completely different compared to Rybka. For me that is the joke of the year!

Hello Jeroen,

I will submit that you are an expert in how Rybka plays chess given your connection with the program.

Using the games submitted, can you indicate the similarities that you see please? It may be obvious to you but I believe that to persons such as myself that some concrete analysis would serve to illuminate rather than get personal and sarcastic and end up providing more heat than light.

Reading that Houdini is Rybka 3 plus bugfixes without a scrap of analysis behind it seems to me to be a personal attack except what is being thrown around seems couched in scientific language without the science. All I need is some proof and less insults and sly remarks.

I believe you can assist in the process of education.

Some of the posts here are already crossing lines....

Later.

[mwyoung]

This is the most funny comment I have been reading since a while. You must believe in fairy tales

Jeroen,

Look at the very fine game of chess presented by Bram. Compare the evaluations and the ponder moves. Consider whether Rybka has correctly evaluated the trapped bishop, and whether Houdini has done so.

Curiously, over the last 18 months you have made exactly 4 posts at Talkchess, and every time your *only* goal appeared to be to denigrate Houdini or other competitors of Rybka.
Surely a prominent member of the Rybka team can make better contributions to Talkchess than just trash-talking Houdini.

Robert

Right now Houdini and Rybka are close in playing strength. I have Houdini around +20 over Rybka on my rating list. Some have Rybka a bit stronger.

Now it is panic time for Rybka, because if the new version of Houdini improves even a small amount in elo. It will be clearly stronger then Rybka. You will win this arguement over the board, by how well Houdini plays. That is what they fear.