A chess engine in 1326 bytes

http://nanochess.110mb.com/chess3.html

by fizx • 17 years ago

50 16 17 years ago

nanochess.110mb.com

pavs3• 17 years ago

As a Chess engine enthusiast I was aware of pico chess and the fact that nanochess (by the same author) uses winboard protocol is new to me.

Most people thinks that Deep Blue solved chess and as far as computer chess is concerned, the field is "finished". But it is far from the truth. The current top Chess engine (rybka) running on an off the self desktop computer could easily beat deepblue. Not because the current desktop hardware is equivalent or superior to deep blue (which it isn't) but because the chess knowledge of current top engine is much superior than deepblue running on a super computer.

Sorry for going a bit off-topic but I thought some of you might this interesting. Actually chess-engine field is a quite interesting field, as long as you are not trying to make money.

likpok• 17 years ago

Have chess engines gotten to the point where they can win without cheating (e.g. being reprogrammed between rounds)?

pavs3• 17 years ago

Are you referring to opening books and endgame tablebases? They are not "preprogarmmed" into the chess engines (at least I have never seen one since the late 90s).

For UCI protocol the openbooks and TB are handled by the GUI - with an option to not use them. Same with the winboard protocol engine - but the engines handle the opening book and TB with the option to not use them if configured. Nothing is pre-programmed.

Opening book is the combination of best moves in the opening stages of the game taken from 1000s of games played by human players. Chess engine uses them to "minimize" the error in opening position. They can beat even the best grandmaster without opening book.

End-game Tablebases are every possible combination of moves at the end of the game. Currently only 3-4-5-6 pieces TBs are available (a combination of ~1.6 Terabyte of data).

Again, nothing is pre-programmed. Using them gives them an advantage of ~30-40 ELo points, which means little when you are already 300-500 elo points stronger than the strongest human opponent (fair guestimation IMO)

EDIT: Just realized you wrote "reprogrammed" not "preprogrammed", not sure what do you mean by "between rounds" and "Cheating". Most strong chess programs are binary builds and most of them use popular protocols like UCI and Winboard to handle GUI functions and everything is automated so I am kinda confused by the "reprogrammed" part.

jimfl• 17 years ago

"e.g. being reprogrammed between rounds"

e.g. learning

ca98am79• 17 years ago

I guess it won't ever be finished until chess is solved (like checkers). But it is finished in a way, because chess engines are much better than the best human players. It has ended an era in chess - there is less motivation to devote your life to a game that a computer will always be able to do better.

gaius2• 17 years ago

How does that follow? The existance of cars doesn't discourage runners or cyclists.

sireat• 17 years ago

Emphasis on your last sentence. There really isn't much room to advance commercially after Rybka. It is scary how good its evaluation function is compared to other engines. Even if some other engine manages to beat its strength, it will not mean much practically to a paying human(even a GM).

That said, what interesting developments are you seeing in chess engines? I know that Rybka is aggressively pruning its search tree (its pos/s is an order of magnitude less than say Fritz), but question is how?

fizx2• 17 years ago

Anyone play it yet? It's a pretty easy thing to do, apparently. There's windows binaries, and on mac, I'd just use the command line interface, and follow along with eboard (sudo port install eboard).

I'm about to start my first game. I'm going to laugh when it kicks my arse.

Edit: It prints out an ASCII-art board after every move. Apparently (since it's deterministic) it plays Scandinavian Opening against 1. e4. Anyhow, try it out.

fizx2• 17 years ago

I played it two quick games, in both of which I took a piece advantage in mid-game tactics. It's not terrible, but it doesn't seem to think more than 2-3 moves ahead. I'm a pretty casual player.

robryan• 17 years ago

You'd imagine that its just using a very simple minimax algorithm and not stepping a great deal of turns ahead? Can't imagine you could build to many rules into code of that length.

hyperbovine• 17 years ago

Finally, a chess engine I can beat!

Just kidding, probably not.

teeja• 17 years ago

I like the idea of programs (and machines) that are lean and mean. (Dinosaurs were big too.) There's something really satisfying about a few lines of code that replace a hundred.

A chess engine in 1326 bytes

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