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4th Computer Chess Tournament
An anonymous reader writes: "The 4th computer chess tournament is being held online at Internet Chess Club over the next two weekends. Over 50 chess programs are involved, from commercial engines to amateur homebrews. Most will be operated by their authors. Details at CCT4 homepage. Last tournament (CCT3) there was live commentary by titled human chess masters. If you're a fan of chess or computer chess programming, login to ICC this weekend as a guest and watch the action."
As for the hardware, you are free to use what ever you want. It would be impossible to try to get all participants use the same computer-power and to make sure that they do.
Imagine....
Without equal hardware platforms, this will be hard to be more than just entertainment. It isn't much of a good benchmark of the programs involved.
This is especially true when you consider that certain processors are usually faster at certain critical operations in cases like this. It also apparently doesn't ban ASICs and other things that could make a huge difference. On the plus side, maybe we will start seeing PCI chess accelerator cards.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
as if getting picked on for being in this chess club wasn't enough.. they had to go make an internet chess club to insure that nerds will get a good beating by the jocks.
I think it would make it wholly more entertaining if they printed out move-lists and provided a viewer which reproduced the moves, say one or two a second.
It'd make the games more interesting to those of us who actually play (and don't just code chess), and it would get the public involved (can you picture a CNN short on this without having any sort of visual representation - it's the only way it'll get coverage!)
I was reading through the biography of Claude Shannon (information theory guy) and was surprised to read that he also did important research in chess-playing computers. The biographer suggested that his innovations are still in use today. Does anybody know more about this? How do you program a computer to play chess, anyway?
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
More details are at the site and at the FIDE's network site (Fédération Internationale des Échecs).
As far as this tournament is concerened, I welcome it entirely and enthusiastically. Finally there will be a way for the greatest chess programmers (in theory) to be under the "same roof" and possibly get together to swap secrets so that the mid-level bots on-line could actually dish out something other than four variations and stumble the rest of the way through.
And to any players on /. that are also on USCL drop me an email through my link and we'll see if we can get together for some games.
See you on board :o)
"From of old, there are not lacking things that have attained Oneness." - Lao Tzu
Why isn't gnuchess in this tournament? I'd love to see how it stacks up to all the other engines.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Calculating the whole game would take, on average, a few dozen orders of magnitude longer than the expected life of the universe, using current computers, so I'd call "much longer than a minute" a rather large understatement.
"From of old, there are not lacking things that have attained Oneness." - Lao Tzu
Usually they do compete.
Chessmaster is not an engine per se. It uses "the King", which was written by König. If the King is not in the competition it is probably because it is a bit old and not up to the challenge of beating Fritz, Deep Junior, Shredder, Chess Tiger/Gambit Tiger, Ferret and the other really strong programs.
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
Chess computers are pretty boring. Every single one uses the standard alpha-beta algorithm, used in most games, with modifications for hashing. The difference comes in the evaluation of the leave positions, which position to "extend" (extensions mean that the position is deemed unstable, so you calculate a bit further), in which order the different moves in a position is evaluated, etc.
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
Because this sticker wouldn't help sell copies of the game:
"Chessmaster 9000. We finished 12th in the All-World Computer Chess Competition!"
Probably too much risk for them. Maybe they would enter the program under a pseudo-name?
If you want to play your own game of chess against people all over the internet, check out SICO . People take turns playing a single move in all sorts of wacky variations. It's weird but addicting...
It pains me that on a site dedicated to open source that we should entirely ignore the history if ICC. Once there was the Internet Chess Server (ICS) which was free, source could be obtained and all. Then one of the people maintaining the server decided to make it propietary and charge for membership. Of course a splinter group decided they wanted a truly free server and that became the Free Internet Chess Server (www.freechess.org), however their lofty ideals came to an end when they saw others using their ideas and not giving back to the community (GPL does not stipulate you must distribute your software) and since then the version of the server software available to download as not been updated.
Now I don't mean to rant about percieved evils, whats done is done, but for a site dedicated to open source I believe this must be mentioned.
Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt. --Herbert Hoover
> watch the action.
As interesting as chess is, "action" is a pretty piss-poor word to describe the game.
Suspense, maybe. Action, not unless steven segal burst in and sprayed the place down with a machine gun.
Hmm, where to start. My name is Mig Greengard and I run Garry Kasparov's website. I work with Shay Bushinsky, who is one of the programmers of Junior, the current world microcomputer chess champion. Just leaping at a chance to karma whore in my specialty. Let me cruise through the various questions and misperceptions I've seen so far.
This is an online tournament held in the biggest online chessplaying site, the ICC. The games are "60 + 10" time control, meaning each computer gets 60 minutes on its clock and 10 seconds are added for each move. So games can last up to 2.5 hours, tops. If you think this is long, this is what we call "rapid chess." Classical games can last up to seven hours.
Uniform hardware has pretty much been given up. They still distinguish between microcomputer and massive machines like those at NASA and Deep Blue, but everything is pretty much wide open these days. The programmers try to get the best hardware they can and usually know very well which platform is best for their program. (There WERE hardware chess accelerator cards, by the way. Back in the 80s when RISC and dedicated chess processors had better cost/chess performance ratios than CPUs. This hasn't been true since the Pentium, although various "Deep Blue on a chip" initiatives exist, including one by a member of the DB team.)
Anyone with a Slashdot account automatically forfeits the ability to call anyone else a nerd.
Move lists and online replay are both available on the site in the original post and at the ICC. Move lists are called "PGN" (portable (or player) game notation") which is an ASCII format used in databases but can be printed out and read easily if you know algabraic chess notation. Online java game viewer applets are quite common.
Both Shannon and Turing spent quite a lot of time on chess algorithms. Shannon actually wrote the first chess program before a computer existed. He 'ran' the program using slips of paper and generated moves this way.
The chess programming breakdown already posted is pretty good. The key concept these days is brute force speed versus knowledge. 20 years ago most programmers thought you needed to make the thing somehow think like a human because the brute force method was so slow. Intel and Moore won. The "fast searchers" now dominate thanks to the minimax algorithm. It just looks at one line after another and counts the beans to rapidly prune. Programs differ to an extreme degree in the amount of knowledge they apply. (HIARCS, for example, is one of the few "slow" programs at the top. It applies a lot of knowledge and looks at maybe 1% of the number of positions the fast programs like Fritz and Junior check.) A top level program, and the top 5-8 are roughly equal at a given time, will look at over one million positions per second. This sounds like a lot (well, it is a lot), but it only puts the program at a level equal to a top 100 level player at a classical time control. (At faster time controls, particularly blitz games of just minutes per side, computers are lethal. Humans just can't play mistake-free chess at that speed.) A program will look six-eight moves deep on the average, but extension will dive deeply into promising or unclear lines, sometimes up to 20 moves in a middlegame position.
Those who think chess is solvable should speak only theoretically. The number of positions is one of those great "million times the number of stars times the grains of sand in the world" numbers. The current method of tree and pruning adds less than one full move of search depth when you double processing power (node count). So the diminishing returns are very much here. The game of go is even worse for comps. Top programs still can't touch the human masters. Back-solving chess using massive databases starting with just a few pieces has had a big impact on computer chess in the past decade. Invented by Ken Thompson (yes, that Ken Thompson), endgame tablebases can now play any combination of five pieces (and many combinations of six) perfectly. This leads to humorous situations of a computer making optically stupid moves to reach a tablebase position it knows for sure is a mathematical win. (Tablebases allow the once-fantastical announcements of things like "checkmate in 45 moves.")
Most of the top commercial programs ARE playing in this event, but most people, particularly chess-ignorant Americans, only know Chessmaster. Fritz, Junior, HIARCS, and Shredder are all top commercial programs. In the chess world, Fritz is almost synonymous with chess program. Chessmaster has a very strong engine (called The King) by a well-known Dutch programmer. Various versions of The King have participated in these competitions and done just fine. Chessmaster has no reason to put its name brand on the line in these bloodbaths. An open tournament like this of only 11 rounds is not at all scientific, for one, but there mostly it's that since all these programs are so strong the power of the engine really isn't the most relevant thing when an amateur buys a chess program. Features like training materials, game databases, GUI, and graphics are much more relevant. Any decent program will kill you on even a low level unless you are an expert.
There are dozens of places to play online, and most of them have computer players as well. KasparovChess has multiple versions of the champion program Junior running and a new one generates when someone starts a game with one so you can always give it a try. (It's a dumbed-down version or it wouldn't be much fun.) The sites with the most players are, inevitably, Yahoo! and MSN. Their software and community suck, of course. Location, location, location. Of the specialist sites, the ICC, chess.net, and KasparovChess.com (my site, as disclosed above) are the largest and best. They have downloadable client software and administrated communities as well as live events, lessons, etc.
There have been many attempts at the holy grail of a massive online tournament. The biggest problem is simply cheating using these programs we're talking about. I could go on for a few dozen pages about methods and countermethods for catching cheats, but basically it's impossible at the end of the day. Don't get me started. KasparovChess hosted the first super-tournament to be played online, in the beginning of 2000. We had human observers with each Grandmaster, all over the world. We also hosted the largest online tournament so far, the world school chess championships. Thousands of kids from hundreds of schools around the world played. (Gotta trust the kids and teachers, right? Right? Actually there were several accusations made, but no decent cases.)
Yes, the ICC used to be free, and that free internet chess server (FICS) is still alive and well, although it is rapidly losing market share. There was a long and bitter battle about that split and the use of the FICS kernel, which is the foundation of just about every chess playing site in the world.
We cover top computer chess events, of which this one really isn't, but if you want to browse around some start here, at the last world championship. WMCCC
It sounds funny, but in the computer championships they have to play face to face and the programmer himself has to make the moves. The worry, of course, is HUMAN cheating, that is, a strong human helping the computer in an online event. The wisdom of a human Grandmaster combined with the accuracy of a computer program would be a devastating combination. (They have competitions of this, with GMs using computers while they play. It's called 'advanced chess' and was introduced by Kasparov. It's interesting, but not always dramatically superior quality chess.)
You can also stop by and play for free, either with an account and a rating or as a guest. We have a java applet if you don't want to download and install. We also have a lot of "learn to play" materials if you are one of the sad crowd that think it's just another board game.
Saludos, Mig
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