Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

@Kevin Pacey

I have noticed the new version (maybe from before) Hannibal Chess & Frog Chess are present but not Waffle Chess.

I have created a script, which is quite easy. If you are curious to adding it into your copy of chessV2.2 there you go:

Game 'Waffle Chess' : 'Generic 10x8'
{
Invented = "2017";
InventedBy = "Kevin Pacey";
Symmetry = MirrorSymmetry;

SetGameVariables
{
Array = "rnbwqkwbnr/pppppppppp/10/10/10/10/PPPPPPPPPP/RNBWQKWBNR";
Castling = "Standard";
PawnDoubleMove = true;
EnPassant = true;
PromotionTypes = "QRBNW";
}

AddPieceTypes
{
AddChessPieceTypes();
AddPieceType( Phoenix, "Waffle", "W", 285, 285 );
}
}

Well I actually don't know the invention year :)!

Actually, this does not quite work.  Waffle Chess has a unusual castling rule (which is why it was not included.)  I had planned to add support for "Fast Castling" but it didn't make it into this release.  Probably it will be in the next one.

Ah, I forgot this detail. They don't all have the same castling rules :(!

I want to try batch mode on Enep to find out which side is better. I'd bet on the side with the extra pawn based on the few games I watched with ChessV 1, but who knows. For that I'm asked for a control file. How do I write one?

I have whatched a few games today, engine vs engine mode, and chessV2.2 is definetly a marvel. Extremelly fun! Big congratilations!

The control file is a tab-delimited text file.  The first row is the header row identifying what is in each column.  Each row after is a game that will be played.

The required columns are:

Game - the filename of a saved-game file (*.sgf)

Engine1 - the engine playing player 1 ("ChessV", "Fairy-Max", etc.)

Engine2 - the engine playing player 2 ("ChessV", "Fairy-Max", etc.)

Time Control - the time controls (“1:30” would be entire game in 1 minute 30 seconds, “0:10+2” would be a base time of 10 seconds, plus an increment of 2 seconds for each move.)

Other columns are optional:

ID - If you want to identify the games in some special way.  By default they will just be identified by row number.

Variation - The variation of play (“None”, “Small”, “Medium”, or “Large”.  Default is None.)

Player1 and Player2 - How you want the sides identified for purposes of counting up statistics.  By default, it will use the engine names.  Which is reasonable if the purpose of the test is to pit ChessV against Fairy-Max and see which one does better.  For ChessV vs. ChessV, it won’t accomplish much.  In your case, you are testing Augmented Knight vs. Extra Pawn, so name your player accordingly.  Also note this can do variable substitution in the form of #{variable}, so for testing different armies, you would specify #{WhiteArmy} for player 1 and #{BlackArmy} for player two.

For your purposes, let’s say you have two saved game files - WhiteAugmented.sgf and BlackAugmented.sgf.  They don’t need any moves in them unless you want to have multiple files from different start positions.  Given this, your control file could look like this:

Game    Engine1    Engine2    Time Control    Player1    Player2    Variation
WhiteAugmented.sgf    ChessV    ChessV    0:30    Augmented Knight    Extra Pawn    Small
BlackAugmented.sgf    ChessV    ChessV    0:30    Extra Pawn    Augmented Knight    Small

Thanks a lot. What I don't understand how many repeats will there be? Does it involve copy pasting the two lines over and over again?

That's right.  If your games are all playing from the starting position, you would just paste those two lines over and over again.

It works. Many thanks Greg!

Cool.  Let us know the results :)

The results for enep with time control 1 min and 3 sec/turn, with 20 games played ,are:

Augmented side 9

Extra pawn 11

There were 10 draws

But the program displayed 8-11. For some reason game (victory for the augmented side) 20 did not get counted. A small bug in here Greg. Also if I may a suggestion it would be nice if in the output file the final score is written at the end!...

Another batch of 20 games resulted in:

augmented side 8.5

extra pawn side 11.5

with 7 draws.

The bug appeared again. It seems it does not get the time to increment itself or somethig.

A third batch of 20 games resulted in:

enhanced knight 7.5

extra pawn 12.5

there were 9 draws.

I am testing with a modified preset

http://play.chessvariants.com/pbm/play.php?game%3DAssymetric+army%26settings%3DFIDE-Assym1

But whenever I tried to actually play a RR vs FF preset appears, not my modified army. I would appreciate any help.

Remove all the Game Code and it will work (although with no rule enforcement.)  Apparently the code in the preset doesn't support mixed pieces like that.

I am wondering why that is so? I don't clearly see anything in the code that precludes mixed pieces.

Look at the cwda include file:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/includes/cwda.txt

Towards the end, the switch #wx and switch #bx are placing the appropriate pieces for each army on the board.  Maybe you can set the values for these to something > 4 before the line that includes this file to get around it.

The final batch of games is over:

augmented knight 17

extra pawn 23

with 22 draws

Final results on the enep experiment. There were 100 games at 1 minute + 3 seconds of added time.

enhanced knight 42

extra pawn 58

from which draws were 48 games

I have tried similar experiments for Chess with different armies. It seems the endgame is bad as the computer leaves without reason pieces en prize. Tell me how to help you reproduce this bug. That has probably made results skewed in ENEP games, to!

I'd need a saved game file to investigate.  You should be able to save even during self-play but you have to catch it before the game ends.  Or I can modify it to save out all games.  What armies were you using?

It was a FF-CC game (could have been reversed). An option to save all games could come in handy!...

Actually saving each game could help beacause I can't stare all day at the monitor and the aftergame survelliance could be fun! For know nothing more. Good luck, Greg!

@HG:

I had a problem.  ChessV sometimes wasn't able to find the mate in KRK (for example), despite the fact that I have a custom endgame eval for this combination (which I'm sure is correct.)  I was able to solve this by no longer returning on TT hits on PV nodes.  This is an acceptable solution since you seldom get a cut-off on a PV node so it does not speed things up much, if at all, and it reports shorter PVs.  But I'd still like to understand the problem in case there is something else wrong.

I only return at a PV node if the TT entry depth >= depth remaining and the entry type is Exact.  I also shift mate scores by the ply before returning, as is typically done.  Do you have any insight why I might be missing mates and stumbling into draws by repetition or 50-moves?  I guess my TT code could have a bug, but I don't think so.