Can nobody compile Roden IV?

[PeterO]

Hi,
Is it possible to use Roden III personalities in Rodent IV?

Peter

[PK]

Is it possible to use Rodent III personalities in Rodent IV?

They would have to be converted. I changed engine name to indicate that incompatibility. Three most important differences are king tropism (from Hakkkpeliitta), space evaluation (which I added specifically to be able to create Morphy personality) and totally different treatment of piece/square tables. Rodent IV always uses two sets of them, having two competing piece/square table scores and making a weighted average of them, pulled towards more favourable score (see eval.cpp around line 100). Similar thing is done with mobility. Also, Rodent III personalities contained strength settings, and Rodent IV uses UCI_Elo instead. This means that having separate weak personalities ceased to make sense.

In short - there is a fair chance that full strength personality with low king tropism will be easy to convert. Other than that - no.

[shogi4fun]

I like to convert all famous personalities from Rodent3 to Rodent4.
I hope the community will help to set the new values and adjust that one splitted to Mg/Eg.
And I hope the community will also create new ones for the missing famous persons.

Limiting strength and keeping the playing style is a very difficulty thing.
How you like to limit? Bad pawn structure (isolated pawn)? But where would be the original playing style.
Or do you like the engine should make blunder?
(I know about engines doing so, making blunder and continue very strong with less material.)

But this remember me the following and I can't believe, I didn't remember earlier:
in chess it's not so popular, but it is very common in the game shogi. Even in history of chess it was used (coffeehouse chess) and was starting in chess again, because the unbeatable engines.
I'm speaking about giving handicap.
For example read here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_(chess)

Unfortunately, the only 2 free programs for android supporting engines and chess960 didn't allow editing a chess960 position.
But you can do it in standard chess.

[shogi4fun]

Finaly, my changes and and chess960 implementation are in the official git-code.
Still there should be a lot of TESTING, TESTING, TESTING done, before the next official release.

I would be happy, if you test especially chess960-variant on android
1) Chess for All (https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... hessforall)
2) Chess from Jeroen Carolus (https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... roid.chess)

Here you can download the test-builds:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/vwbcb29de9qj ... TPdN0bugJa

I've made two for Android (arm64-v8a and armeabi-v7a) and one for windows (thanks to mingw there are no additional DLLs needed).
All builds also in a debug-version, where the main difference is, that writing a log is on by default. If you find errors, this can be very helpfully.
Oh, and my builds are all single-threaded. Nvertheless, it's open source and everybody can add his own builds.

[Ovyron]

There's no reason to convert Rodent III personalities into Rodent IV ones, because people can still use Rodent III and it wasn't worse than IV for those purposes.

Better to put that effort into creating new personalities, for Rodent III or IV (mainly, if it's easier to create them for III then people would be better to continue creating them for III.)

[shogi4fun]

There's no reason to convert Rodent III personalities into Rodent IV ones, because people can still use Rodent III and it wasn't worse than IV for those purposes.

Better to put that effort into creating new personalities, for Rodent III or IV (mainly, if it's easier to create them for III then people would be better to continue creating them for III.)

Of course everybody can continue using III if he/she likes.

Here the reasons I won't do so:
- III is no longer supported, IV is (again)
- on III you can't play chess960 (furthermore for example against Fischer personality)
- III has no (good) android support (that one published in "Chess Engines Collection" you have no access to personality/book-files to edit or change them - the only way would be this one, where you have edit absolute pathes: http://chess4android.blogspot.com/2017/ ... ngine.html)

And there are still other reasons which belongs only to me, so I won't bore you with it.

I can't create new personalities of famous persons. Okay, (almost) everyone can do (almost) everything. But for me, this would mean reading a lot of books of famous persons, studying there games and learn understanding their style.
I don't like doing it, but I have fun in converting.

But I would be happy for everyone who will create personalities of famous persons and will make it public, so it can be added to IV-git.

[shogi4fun]

Unfortunately arena is not following uci standards, so the GUI must somehow tell rodent how to handle castling.

I've uploaded two new EXE files for windows.
There you have go to the engine settings (try Ctrl+1) and set CastleNotation to "O-O".
Then Chess960 will work, but ALSO standard chess without any switching needed.

[Ovyron]

Here the reasons I won't do so:
- III is no longer supported, IV is (again)
- on III you can't play chess960 (furthermore for example against Fischer personality)
- III has no (good) android support (that one published in "Chess Engines Collection" you have no access to personality/book-files to edit or change them - the only way would be this one, where you have edit absolute pathes: http://chess4android.blogspot.com/2017/ ... ngine.html)

It seems the best course of action would be to add Chess960 and Android support to Rodent III.

Unfortunately we've reached the point at which it'd be easier to re-create those personalities from scratch than trying to port them to Rodent IV, because if we'd be copying how they played, why not just copy how the original human played?

[shogi4fun]

Karl Schreiner is heavily working again on his android apps and has recently (when talkchess was unreachable and I couldn't tell about it ) released updates on GooglePlay with the following remarkable changes:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/deve ... +Schreiner

Chess for All
- button to easily start chess960 games
- implemented OEX-support
- embeded rodent IV (and even made it default, beside embeded stockfish)

Chess Engines OEX
- changed to OEX
- also included rodent IV

Rodent personality- and book-files are not included yet, so you still have to copy them manually.
Also Chess4All don't support uci-options yet, but you can edit default.txt or also use other GUIs.

I got more experienced with android NDK and finally my builds are also working with multithreading.
And furthermore, finally I was able setup a gradle environment, able in creating APKs. So I'm also able in releasing rodent4 together with personality- and book-files. Maybe that would help about test-versions.