Als Antwort auf: / In reply to: Re: info about Fruit geschrieben von: / posted by: Ulrich Tuerke at 10 March 2004 15:54:37:
EOF (had been in brackets and thus skippedIt's often surprising how little chess knowledge is necessary in order to create a reasonable play.Hello,
My first (technically second) post on the Winboard forum.
This is about my new engine Fruit.
Good thing that Dann released a version yesterday, I gain half a day then.
Sorry it is UCI only at the moment. I use xboard on linux and have my own "UCI2WB" adapter. I will see later with Dann Corbit if we manage to port it to Windows.
I will make sure Winboard users have some way of running my engine. If all fails, I will add Winboard support to the code, although this is against my design goals (code quality).
Fruit as of now is a completely untested engine that I wrote a year ago.
It has slept on my hard disk since then.
Suddenly I get motivated again by seeing tournaments beeing ran on the Internet e.g. WBEC.
I thought I would enjoy beeing part of that, but there is a long way to go ...
First step was to release my engine "as is" (as it was last year).
So I can start improving it (modifying a lot of code), without having to worry about when to release a stable version.
In short I'm not sure about what the code does anymore, I will have to reread the code!
I intend to change a lot of (small) things in the few months to come and that will introduce new bugs.
At least there will be a stable release to compare it to (should be next week if testing is OK).
It is true that I claim my engine is weak, because I know all that's missing from the code (few examples below).
But it is a completely untested engine, maybe it is good, I just don't expect it to be.
Example, what's in the eval:
- piece-square table
- static pawn eval (only basic pawn types, no interaction with pieces)
- 3 or 4 boolean features like "if there an "own pawn" along my "forward" bishop diagonals" (negative score)
That's all!!!
No king safety, no mobility of any kind, no connected passers, *no knowledge of drawish endgames*!
How could such a program play decent chess I do not know, it's not even fast.
Search:
R=3 nullmove, extend all check evasions 1 ply, try all checks 1st ply of quiescence.
That's all!!!
No other extension.
No parameter tuned, nothing tested!
After the release I will test several combinations of search parameter.
If I have time next week-end I will add them as UCI options so people can play with it.
In commercial programs they are already tuned so you can't improve the program.
I really do not understand.
I have king safety
I have mobility based on number of moves.
I thought they are important.
maybe the 3 or 4 boolean features that I do not have are important.
What do you mean that is all?
What about order of moves(maybe it is better than other engines?)
I am sure that it is possible to improve commercial programs and the results that I read suggest that commercial programs are extremely weak.
I did not test fruit against movei but based on reading Dann's post I got the impression that my movei is at similiar level to fruit and movei proved to be not without chances against commercial programs.
I guess that you have some advantages like better order of moves and better use of hash tables relative to me.
I am sure that the way that I use hash tables is extremely bad relative to other programs.
Uri
A long time ago, I had had a look into the code of Bruce's Gerbil, which already plays fairly well imho. When looking at the evaluation code, I found
In case, I would have the idea to write a new program, I would think much more about any piece of evaluation code before implementing; basic rule: the lesser the better, in case of doubt regarding usefulness of the code I'd rather skip it.
Uli

before it really started, what had puzzled me a lot.