Retro CC : Colossus 4 on C64 vs a 1600 player

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Vinvin
Posts: 5311
Joined: Thu Mar 09, 2006 9:40 am
Full name: Vincent Lejeune

Retro CC : Colossus 4 on C64 vs a 1600 player

Post by Vinvin »

I played some games against Colossus 4 on Commodore 128 (in Commodore 64 compatibility mode) around 35 years ago. I become a club player and a computer chess fan many years after that. The question still open for me : what's the real strength of this old chess programs ?
So, I had the idea to propose to a French chess streamer on Twitch to play a 2 games match against Colossus 4 (Time control 15 min + 30 sec/move). I offered 40 euros if he wins the match and 20 euros in case of 1-1.
He played on chess.com and I played against him, I copy the move into the program in a Commodore 64 emulator (available here : https://vice-emu.sourceforge.io/ ).
I set the time control to 60 moves in 60 minutes in Colossus and I used the Wrap mode for the emulator (around 900% of the original speed) to get the response faster.

Dicomaniaque is rated around 1600 in rapid on chess.com, but he talks a lot to the Twitch chat, so he loses a lot of time and don't focus enough on long tactical lines.
The 2 games were a hard fight.

First game was pretty balanced but a mistake by Dicomaniaque in the endgame forced him to force the draw with 2 rooks on the 7th.

In the second game, Colossus misevaluate a piece unbalance : BB+isolated pawns vs R+P, and it made a big mistake 17.Kd1?? leaving the king in the middle of the board instead of hiding the king on f1. Dicomaniaque never understood he has a winning attack. And he made a big blunder at the end because of time pressure.

Score : 1.5/2 for Colossus. We will retry the same match next week.

I copied both games on Lichess with graph analysis here :
First game : https://lichess.org/AU698y57
Second game : https://lichess.org/yF3B3nkE

Info about ColossusChess :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_Chess
https://www.chessprogramming.org/Colossus_Chess

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Vinvin
Posts: 5311
Joined: Thu Mar 09, 2006 9:40 am
Full name: Vincent Lejeune

Re: Retro CC : Colossus 4 on C64 vs a 1600 player

Post by Vinvin »

Vinvin wrote: Thu Feb 10, 2022 9:42 pm (Time control 15 min + 30 sec/move)
Correction : the time control is 15 min + 10 sec/move