Greg Strong wrote on Sun, Mar 31, 2019 03:46 PM UTC:
Hi, H.G. It's good to hear from you and to hear that you are working on another engine to help test these things! I got distracted on other things and never got around to following up. I have far too many different projects that attract my attention - usually chess variant stuff, but sometimes other things as well. I found this programming language for writing interactive fiction (think Zork) where source code reads like English called Inform7. I would not have thought it possible for a real programming language to be a subset of English. Wild stuff. But yeah, anyway, I get sidetracked a lot :)
First, I did complete the FIDEs vs. Nutters test with the FIDEs given added incentive to move forward through the PST. This helped a tiny bit, but not much at all:
Nutty Knights: 261
Fabulous FIDEs: 84
draw: 55
My next thought is to reduce the value of the knight and bishop when facing off against the Nutters. This will give the FIDEs a strong desire to trade off and the Nutters will have to limit their options to prevent that. Once the minor pieces are traded off I think the FIDEs are fine. I don't believe a charging rook is better than a normal one, although a colonel may be a little better than a queen.
I have recently switched back to trying to get the next version of ChessV out. I have several new features that are mostly done that just need to be closed out. (Of course, I don't always finish a feature before starting on the next ...) The most siginificant of these is that I have added a stand-alone ChessV CECP engine so it can be run without the GUI. This code is all written but almost completely untested. I admit I've been procrastinating on that. In the whole scope of this project, there is nothing that is less appealing to me than trying to plan/code/debug for inter-process communication. The other side of the coin - ChessV's ability to host other XBoard engines is not 100% bug-free either, although it is certainly good enough to be usable.
The material hash is something else I've added but am not making much use of yet. It is implemented as you describe, and will handle binding of any kind such as your even/odd file example. I think it was here I described the recursive algorithm I used to find all the different 'slices' of the board for any given piece. (I'm calling them slices rather than colors because colors becomes confusing when different pieces have different bindings - the knight in Alice Chess being a wacky example.) It will be interesting to see what scientific testing determines colorbinding bonuses/penalties should be for multiple color-bound pieces. Currently, ChessV starts discounting the value of pieces heavily starting with the second piece bound to a slice if there are no pieces on a complimentary slice.
Regarding enabling CwDA for inter-engine play, yes, I am definitely interested in figuring out how we can do this. I am certainly of the opinion that both our GUIs and all our engines should be as inter-operable as possible. I will post some thoughts about this shortly. (I'll start a new thread for it.)
Hi, H.G. It's good to hear from you and to hear that you are working on another engine to help test these things! I got distracted on other things and never got around to following up. I have far too many different projects that attract my attention - usually chess variant stuff, but sometimes other things as well. I found this programming language for writing interactive fiction (think Zork) where source code reads like English called Inform7. I would not have thought it possible for a real programming language to be a subset of English. Wild stuff. But yeah, anyway, I get sidetracked a lot :)
First, I did complete the FIDEs vs. Nutters test with the FIDEs given added incentive to move forward through the PST. This helped a tiny bit, but not much at all:
My next thought is to reduce the value of the knight and bishop when facing off against the Nutters. This will give the FIDEs a strong desire to trade off and the Nutters will have to limit their options to prevent that. Once the minor pieces are traded off I think the FIDEs are fine. I don't believe a charging rook is better than a normal one, although a colonel may be a little better than a queen.
I have recently switched back to trying to get the next version of ChessV out. I have several new features that are mostly done that just need to be closed out. (Of course, I don't always finish a feature before starting on the next ...) The most siginificant of these is that I have added a stand-alone ChessV CECP engine so it can be run without the GUI. This code is all written but almost completely untested. I admit I've been procrastinating on that. In the whole scope of this project, there is nothing that is less appealing to me than trying to plan/code/debug for inter-process communication. The other side of the coin - ChessV's ability to host other XBoard engines is not 100% bug-free either, although it is certainly good enough to be usable.
The material hash is something else I've added but am not making much use of yet. It is implemented as you describe, and will handle binding of any kind such as your even/odd file example. I think it was here I described the recursive algorithm I used to find all the different 'slices' of the board for any given piece. (I'm calling them slices rather than colors because colors becomes confusing when different pieces have different bindings - the knight in Alice Chess being a wacky example.) It will be interesting to see what scientific testing determines colorbinding bonuses/penalties should be for multiple color-bound pieces. Currently, ChessV starts discounting the value of pieces heavily starting with the second piece bound to a slice if there are no pieces on a complimentary slice.
Regarding enabling CwDA for inter-engine play, yes, I am definitely interested in figuring out how we can do this. I am certainly of the opinion that both our GUIs and all our engines should be as inter-operable as possible. I will post some thoughts about this shortly. (I'll start a new thread for it.)