ICT 2011

[Gerd Isenberg]

Congrats to Gyula Horváth with Pandix winning the 11th ICT in Leiden with 7/7. Wow! Black day for Hermann. Volker, what happened today?

http://www.csvn.nl/

Gerd

[IanO]

Congratulations to Pandix! Quite a difference from last year that none of the other big boys showed up. I wonder if the recent Rybka controversy has had a chilling effect on computer chess competition?

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

So out of 8 participating engines,4 are private
I say release the private to the public regards,
Dr.D

[hgm]

Spartacus is private because it is not finished yet. It virtually has no evaluation, and it was easy to identify the evaluation terms whose absence was directly responsible for some of the losses (no bonus for King in front of passers in two cases, trapped Rook in another case).

There still is a long way to go with Spartacus, and, considering that I spent nearly 100% of my time on WinBoard, progress is not very rapid. Spartacus was designed to be based on an incrementally updated attack map, (which as a side effect would keep track of piece mobility for free), to be used for generating moves in QS. I had that attack map working a year ago, comparing it with an attack map generated from scratch in every node, and never seeing any difference over many games. (But I did not use it to generate any moves yet.)

But since then I changed the board format from 32x12 to 24x14, which almost certainly broke it, and implemented Spartan Chess in it, which probably requires some modifications because of the jumping pieces. It seems that Spartan Chess is currently broken anyway, since the board format change.

But eventually it will be released, if I solved all that.

[marcelk]

Congratulations to Pandix! Quite a difference from last year that none of the other big boys showed up. I wonder if the recent Rybka controversy has had a chilling effect on computer chess competition?

Rybka's entry was rejected. HIARCS got in a dispute with the organizers
and doesn't play in Leiden anymore.

Unlike last year there was also no money to cover travel
expenses for oversees players and last year's invitees didn't apply...

Stockfish was invited and was offered an operator but kindly rejected.

Regarding the others: The timing of this tournament was
extremely unfortunate, coinciding with a popular holidays weekend
in many parts of Europe. Therefore many programmers decided it is
better to spend time with their families or traveling instead of playing
computer chess.

[Harvey Williamson]

HIARCS got in a dispute with the organizers
and doesn't play in Leiden anymore.

The dispute was about the CSVN Chairman using a pirated copy of Junior in an official tournament. No dispute with the other organisers except that they do not have the balls to stand up to their Chairman.

Junior also will not play this tournament again.

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

Spartacus is private because it is not finished yet. It virtually has no evaluation, and it was easy to identify the evaluation terms whose absence was directly responsible for some of the losses (no bonus for King in front of passers in two cases, trapped Rook in another case).

There still is a long way to go with Spartacus, and, considering that I spent nearly 100% of my time on WinBoard, progress is not very rapid. Spartacus was designed to be based on an incrementally updated attack map, (which as a side effect would keep track of piece mobility for free), to be used for generating moves in QS. I had that attack map working a year ago, comparing it with an attack map generated from scratch in every node, and never seeing any difference over many games. (But I did not use it to generate any moves yet.)

But since then I changed the board format from 32x12 to 24x14, which almost certainly broke it, and implemented Spartan Chess in it, which probably requires some modifications because of the jumping pieces. It seems that Spartan Chess is currently broken anyway, since the board format change.

But eventually it will be released, if I solved all that.

Thanks and take your time
Dr.D

[mclane]

Congratulations to Pandix!

let us hope that there will be a release of pandix we one day could buy.

i would be interested in doing so.

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto]

Deep Sjeng didn't join because I'm in the US for work.