the fish vs the dragon


jts

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The Thoresen Chess Engines Competition, season 2 of 2013, superfinal is under way. The season 1 champion, the magician Houdini, is out of the competition. Now it's between the fish and the dragon, Stockfish vs Komodo. Did you ever see a fish eat a dragon? I think that is what is going to happen.

Stockfish searches really deep. In the endgame where there are few pieces, it sometimes goes scary deep. I think to do a search that deep, it has to do a selective search instead of a full width search. In the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and some portion of the 1990s, full width search consistently played stronger than selective search. The reason why was that programmers had a hard time telling the computer how to select candidate moves intelligently. The human mind does that very well. If I remember right, it was in the 1990s, with Hydra, that programmers started to make chess engines that play stronger selective search than full width search.

The magician, Houdini, uses a best compromise between selective and full width, this best compromise being found by playing thousands of lightning fast games between variations of itself.

I suspect that the dragon Komodo, takes extra time out for evaluation, thereby cutting down the depth of the search. One of the programmers behind Komodo is GM Larry Kaufman, who wrote this scientific paper.

http://home.comcast.net/~danheisman/Articles/evaluation_of_material_imbalance.htm

This is a 48 game fight between the fish and the dragon.

http://tcec.chessdom.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockfish_%28chess%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_%28chess%29

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