I have an ongoing game right now where several engines
said I have nearly a one Pawn advantage but not one of them seemed
to suggest a continuation that looked like it would lead to a win; all they were doing was
shifting pieces around without any real ‘plan’ that I could see. Because the engines weren’t offering anything
constructive, I played a move that was not recommended by any of them and their
evaluations actually showed the move to be about one quarter of a P better than
their own suggestions. I’m not sure
about the win though because it looks like an opposite color B ending is
likely. True, shootouts give me a win in
about 100 moves. That’s not real reliable but at least it’s my opponent who has
all the losing chances.
Houdini 1.5a is free and has risen to the top spot on every rating list that will include it and programmer Robert Houdart has admitted that he incorporated code from previously existing chess engines such as Firebird and Crafty. What he ended up with is an overwhelming strong positional program.
From what I’ve read, Firebird is considered by many to be one of the best computer chess programs in the world. Of course there is also some controversy associated with Firebird as Vasik Rajlich, the founder of Rybka, has alleged that the programmers of Firebird copied nearly all of his code. However, this claim has never been substantiated and after Rajlich and Rybka got busted for ‘code stealing’ who cares?
The real test is how do these engines do in
‘real’correspondence play? For the last 28 games that I have played on LSS I
have been using FireBird 1.2v64 and my results are +6 -5 =17. Not too
impressive but when I checked that against my previous 28 games where I used
Houdini 1.5x64 my results were +3 -7 =18 so the results with FireBird have
clearly been better. In addition to switching to FireBird, I also spent some
time putting together my own opening book with the result that I began getting
better positions out of the openings. I do not have endgame tablebases
installed on my computer, but have, as the endgame approaches, gone to the
Shredder online endgame database and looked at potential endings. This has
saved a couple of games and also allowed me to squeeze out a couple of wins.
Still a +1 isn’t anything to crow about, but it’s better than a -4 and I
attribute the better results to be the use of FireBird, a better opening book
and checking potential endings against the tablebase. It appears breaking the
2200 barrier on LSS is still a ways off unless I can think of something else.
Oh, there is one thing...I could study
and try to improve.
Thank you very much for this post. I tried Houdini 1.5a w32 and found it much stronger than the Hiarcs 13.2 I had been using, which cost me approx. $A70 into the bargain.
ReplyDeletethe chess engine is a tools, only the experience can fusiĆ³n on victory.. @ratachu
ReplyDelete