Thursday, 06 March 2008

Frustration

Even though I haven't posted in a while - Vicki is not dead. I'm having huge issues with Vicki at the moment which is taking up a great deal of time. The biggest problem at the moment is the transposition tables that are not working as it should. Every time I implement it, the engine plays weaker...substantially weaker. This can only be as the result of a bug. I hope to have this sorted out in the next week or so...

The transposition table is a very important component and I want that working first, before spending any more time with move ordering and evaluation as these elements share some common ground

8 comments:

Rajiv Bakulesh Shah said...

I'm experiencing exactly the same types of issues as you. Good luck to both of us. :-(

joco said...

Hello there,

No email because the adders might bite ;-)

Very impressive , building an engine.
How come that somebody so capable with Java and programming , makes spelling mistakes and doesn't notice them?

Knowing from experience of working with JavaScript that one comma missing can upset the whole lot, I don't understand the spelling angle.

I do it too, I hasten to add. ;-)

BTW, I thought it was .SA rather than .ZA (=Zuid Afrika I presume.

Please zap this long comment. I just felt like a chat.

Jaco van Niekerk said...

Hi Joco - if you want to chat, try me on google talk ;-) (jvnsparky) Why do I make so many sp3llingg mistakes? simply because I haven't found a good "English" compiler yet! Yes, .sa is for "Suadi Arabia" or something.

Nice chatting with you :-)

Anonymous said...

Greetings,

I was away from chess programming for a number of months, but I got back into it a while ago.

Now I'm trying to make the engine play on FICS (using Arena), but I can't make it work. The actual playing is working nicely, but how do I automatize looking for matches and accepting offers? I have to do that manually now.

That which I send to arena is not sent on to FICS (except during games). Maybe there is special prefix I need to use or something.

Anonymous said...

I found the answer to my question! The command tellics. Time to apply for a engine account on fics.

Anonymous said...

Or even simplier, to alias the "gameend" command sent by arena.

Three posts in a row, sorry. :D

Anonymous said...

Did you ever get your transposition tables working?

Here are a couple of things I found:

Make sure you write a routine that computes zobrist hashes from scratch. Do a full width traversal, like a perft, and make sure you get the same key for incrementally updated keys and keys built from scratch.

Do not expect transposition tables alone to make very much difference at all except in the end game.

Use the best move from the tt to order the list of moves you search: If you do not see a reduction in the number of nodes being touched in a particular fixed depth search, then you are doing something wrong.

Wink Lady said...

VICKI = Deep Blue x 10? ;)