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World Computer Chess Championships Underway
azaris writes "While the FIDE World Championships for human players in Tripoli, Libya are down to the last two contestants, the computers are playing their own 12th World Computer Chess Championship in Ramat-Gan, Israel. How will the open source chess engine Crafty do against the proprietary closed engines? Will the computers play more interesting chess than their human counterparts?"
...that the Computer Chess championship is in Libya, while Qaddafi banned Israeli players from the FIDE championship. Actually, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, president of FIDE and the Russian state of Kalmykia, previously tried to have the FIDE championship in Baghdad before he was forced not to by the first Gulf War.
"No native players"? You were hoping for Native American players?
In case you haven't heard, the USA is (almost entirely) a nation of IMMIGRANTS.
Glad the Russian-American & Japanese-American players have found a better life here.
Acutally, a closed-source engine has been banned over accusations of copying. I guess with open-source there's no worry :)
English is easier said than done.
Crafty managed to draw Shredder, one of the big-name computer programs, in the first round. That makes it tied with a bunch of other programs in the middle of the pack.
Personally, I'm always excited to hear about the progress that has been made by chess engines. Nowadays, the top programs can compete with all of the top humans, without requiring a supercomputer.
--If the world didn't suck, we'd all fall off.
GNUChess is not strong enough.
It has this going for it though, "This release features simplified chess code and modern data structures, which make it more pedantically accessible, easier to modify, and more understandable for skilled chess experts who are not necessarily programmers."
Game theory goes beyond just chess. It's the whole concept of reacting to changing stimuli to reach a specific goal...
(IANAE)
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
> the engines on identical comptuers
This is not correct.
In fact, every contestant is allowed to use his own hardware.
Contestants which are not opting for their own hardware, get an Pentium-4 with 2,8 GHz from the Bar-Ilan-University.
Crafty (freeware) brings its own quad-Opteron machine with 2,4 GHz!
Two other contestants are playing on quad-Opterons, too. Fritz and Shredder are playing with 2,2 GHz resp. 2,0 GHz. Both machines are from the sponsor Transtec.
Positional play
Algorithms / heuristics which have attempted to capture this 'intelligent' side of chess players' methodology have uniformly failed and the winning programs continue to primarily rely on simple evaluation of material.
This means that a master-level player has a strong advantage in offering a computer opponent some material in exchange say for superior control of the center of the board.
Advanced chess play has very little to do with 'intuition'. The specific tools that come to bear are:
exhaustive study of openings and endings
solid tactical evaluation (stupid mistakes still lose games)
positional evaluation
generally, for instance it's suicide to allow a game against a machine develop into an 'open' vs a 'closed' position. Tactical evaluation is less effective in closed positions; in open positions the machine's greater depth-search works extremely well.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
Lasker was probably the best chess-player ever, better than Kasparov, better than Fischer. Translated into today's rankings, he would have ranked about 3000. In tournaments of all of the strongest chess-players in the world at the time, he dominated brilliantly. He was the world champion for, what, 28 years? And chess wasn't even his main profession. I think that if Lasker had played Fischer or Kasparov, he would have won...and I don't think it would have been very close either.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
There are really two classes of computers in the tournament: the good and the bad. Crafty has established itself as the former with draws against Shredder (one of the top programs), Deep Sjeng (not Shredder, but still in the good category), and a win against one of the bad programs. The tournament is typically won by the program which beats all the bad programs and manages to beat some of the good ones. Since the good programs are so hard to earn a win against, giving up a draw to one of the lesser entrants is very, very bad. Crafty has not done this yet, which bodes well for our open source hero.
Here is the Crafty license, from Debian's debian/copyright file database: