What is maximum rating per programmed line...

[JBNielsen]

I just wondered... How strong a chessengine can you make with fx 3.000 lines of C?

[mar]

I just wondered... How strong a chessengine can you make with fx 3.000 lines of C?

Ask HGM. I guess he has about 1 elo per character in uMax.

[Daniel White]

I just wondered... How strong a chessengine can you make with fx 3.000 lines of C?

Line counts are essentially meaningless in C - very few parts of the language require newlines (as far as I'm aware only preprocessor directives need to be on their own line). I would imagine any top C engine could easily be made into a handful of lines.

Elo per character is perhaps a more interesting metric, in which case microMax by H.G.M. probably comes out on top.

[pocopito]

Well, I guess this is an "it depends" case.
Are you thinking of something like micro-max or toledo, that are written in a few more than 1000 _characters_? On the other hand if you're thinking about something written in a more readable way, I guess that TSCP itself has around 2600 lines of C code (I guess it implements alpha-beta + null move + qscent + move ordering, and many of the lines are coments), its strength isn't that bad and I guess there's a lot of possibilities to improve for example in the evaluation function.

Regards

E Diaz

[diep]

I just wondered... How strong a chessengine can you make with fx 3.000 lines of C?

Ask HGM. I guess he has about 1 elo per character in uMax.

Oh one elopoint a character, that's easy to beat:

Code: Select all

int main(){char b[9];printf("draw?");gets(b);if(b[0]!='y')printf("resign\n");return 0;}

[Uri Blass]

Well, I guess this is an "it depends" case.
Are you thinking of something like micro-max or toledo, that are written in a few more than 1000 _characters_? On the other hand if you're thinking about something written in a more readable way, I guess that TSCP itself has around 2600 lines of C code (I guess it implements alpha-beta + null move + qscent + move ordering, and many of the lines are coments), its strength isn't that bad and I guess there's a lot of possibilities to improve for example in the evaluation function.

Regards

E Diaz

Tscp does not use null move pruning or hash tables
and it is easy to make something better in less lines of code.

The relative bad part of tscp is not the evaluation function
and if you want to improve it you can be more succesful in improving the search then improving the evaluation.

Micromax is clearly stronger than tscp based on 40/4 CCRL list.

266 Micro-Max 4.8 1835 +11 −11
304 Tscp 1.81 1559 +16 −16

result in a direct CCRL match between them is
20-4 for MicroMax with 6 draws.

[mar]

Oh one elopoint a character, that's easy to beat:

Code: Select all

int main(){char b[9];printf("draw?");gets(b);if(b[0]!='y')printf("resign\n");return 0;}

[Daniel White]

I just wondered... How strong a chessengine can you make with fx 3.000 lines of C?

Ask HGM. I guess he has about 1 elo per character in uMax.

Oh one elopoint a character, that's easy to beat:

Code: Select all

int main(){char b[9];printf("draw?");gets(b);if(b[0]!='y')printf("resign\n");return 0;}

Slightly better:

Code: Select all

main(){char b[9];puts("draw?");gets(b);if(*b-'y')puts("resign");}

However I prefer H.G.M's definition of a chess engine: http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/definition.txt.

[hgm]

Oh one elopoint a character, that's easy to beat:

Code: Select all

int main(){char b[9];printf("draw?");gets(b);if(b[0]!='y')printf("resign\n");return 0;}

Well, you are the umptieth person to suggest something like that. But why do you think that would have any Elo at all? There already exist engines that have negative Elo without resigning every game (and occasionally winning one). And what you propose would be crushed by it. It would even lose 100-0 from Brutus Random...

Besides, I don't think that 'resigning' counts as playing Chess. On the contrary, it expresses refusal to play it any longer. So why would a program that resigns be considered a Chess program at all?

[hgm]

On the other hand if you're thinking about something written in a more readable way, I guess that TSCP itself has around 2600 lines of C code ...

Micro-Max is not really obfuscated, in contrast to Toledo. The fact that it is not very readable is mainly due to all the variables having single character names, tosave characters. But giving them helpful names is not something that drives up the number of lines. Just the number of characters.

The number of lines in micro-Max is only slightly over 100. And the lines are not particularly long; most contain just one or two simple statements, (like assignments). I actually have a version with intelligible variable names on my website ( http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/maximax.txt ) of one of the earlier micro-Max versions.