Thoughts on Komodo 11, Free engines and the future

[Lyudmil Tsvetkov]

I will review all this, but this requires time
You can take the latest Andscacs from http://www.andscacs.com/en/en_index.html Is clearly stronger.
Thanks!

thanks Daniel!

I will grab Andscacs at some point, not in the next 10 minutes anyway.

btw., to round this off, another shootout with Komodo 10.1, already produced 10 draws, with black having the edge all the time.

same for SF 8, all draws.

so, some progress since Komodo 8 and Sf 6, winning white scores, but drawing.

of course, with correct play exclusively on the king side, slowly pushing storming pawns and activating pieces there, not touching the queen side, black should be winning all games.

[Ras]

f7-f6 is a standard freeing attempt in the French. Usually, if black does not play that on time, simply loses the game, and that is seen in countless instances.

I was able to find an interesting master game that confirms not only this point, but where Black successfully actually attacks on the kingside, and not, as I had argued, on the queenside, so I stand corrected.



Of course, the reason is that White made mistakes, but making mistakes is always the prerequisite for the other side to win.

what better evidence than e5 advance lines score much better than the Exchange, preferred by SF?

As I said, the exchange variation is a way for White heading for a draw. It makes sense if draw is all White needs. Obviously, if White goes for a drawish variant from the beginning, the winning percentage for White is lower.

On the other hand, I can think of reasons why SF may prefer the exchange - because it creates an open position. Maybe Stockfish still has a little bit of the classic engine weakness with closed positions?

is not that what engines have actually been doing?

As per your current objections against Stockfish choosing the exchange, they havn't, have they?

[Ras]

In my database I found 2744 games with that position.
From these games are 1376 ended 1:0, 716 ended 1/1, 652 ended 0:1 so
White advantage is obvious.

White scores 63%, which is above the average winning percentage of 55% (the latter reflecting the advantage of having White).

However, in order to determine whether the e5 pawn is actually causing this advantage, we have to rule out another important Black weakness here, and that is the light squared bishop - Black's worst piece.

Do you have suitable games in your database where the pawn structure is the same, but with Black's light squared bishop outside the pawn chain? Because otherwise, maybe it's the "bad bishop" recognition that could need improvement and not the pawn evaluation?

[Lyudmil Tsvetkov]

f7-f6 is a standard freeing attempt in the French. Usually, if black does not play that on time, simply loses the game, and that is seen in countless instances.

I was able to find an interesting master game that confirms not only this point, but where Black successfully actually attacks on the kingside, and not, as I had argued, on the queenside, so I stand corrected.



Of course, the reason is that White made mistakes, but making mistakes is always the prerequisite for the other side to win.

what better evidence than e5 advance lines score much better than the Exchange, preferred by SF?

As I said, the exchange variation is a way for White heading for a draw. It makes sense if draw is all White needs. Obviously, if White goes for a drawish variant from the beginning, the winning percentage for White is lower.

On the other hand, I can think of reasons why SF may prefer the exchange - because it creates an open position. Maybe Stockfish still has a little bit of the classic engine weakness with closed positions?

is not that what engines have actually been doing?

As per your current objections against Stockfish choosing the exchange, they havn't, have they?

thanks for the attitude.
I like straightforward people.

yeah, SF has a lot of the classical closed positions weakness.

I did not mean to generalise for all possible cases, but for the majority of them. It is easy for engines to get rid of any particular plan, simply because they do not have such.