I asked Hamsters 0.6 to play with other free engines of comparable strength, and after 800 games the rating came to 2665 points in CCRL 40/4 rating list. Though the next update will have more games to complete my "16 above, 16 below" minimum set of opponents.
As expected, ponder hit is very high between Hamsters 0.5 and Hamsters 0.6. I posted before but will repeat here that Kiwi is showing low ponder hit playing with Hamsters, which suggests (to me) that Kiwi and Hamsters are sufficiently different to be considered different engines. (So they could, for example, participate both in the same tournament).
Hamsters 0.6 is currently #26 in my selection of 54 well-tested free single-CPU engines. Hamsters 0.5 would stand at #40 in the same list. Alessandro did great progress last year, I hope the improvement continues into year 2008 as well.
By the way, Hamsters 0.6 evaluates KNN-K as about +7.40 and it played it till the 50 moves rule. It had slight advantage and then exchanged into KNN-K which parhaps costed it 0.5 of a point.
Hi Kirill,
thanks a lot for testing Hamsters, it seems this version is slightly better at blitz after all!
And thanks even more for reporting about the KNNK problem! Hamsters knows about that, but there is a bug that I hadn't noticed so neither KNNK nor KBBK can be used... it will be fixed in next version!
Alessandro Scotti wrote:Hi Kirill,
thanks a lot for testing Hamsters, it seems this version is slightly better at blitz after all!
I was hoping it will get more ELO points actually, after watching other people results. Though my testing is not finished yet, we will see after about one week.
Alessandro Scotti wrote:And thanks even more for reporting about the KNNK problem! Hamsters knows about that, but there is a bug that I hadn't noticed so neither KNNK nor KBBK can be used... it will be fixed in next version!
Well Hamsters has always been underperforming a little (40-50 elo) in CCRL 40/4 so for me this elo is not a surprise. In fact if the result is confirmed it looks like a good improvement!
