Twistofchaos
06-11-2005, 09:53 AM
Hi,
On 11, 12 and 13 November, i will compete in the Leiden Dutch open computerchess-championship with my chessprogram Neurosis.
I started working on my first chessprogram about 5 years ago now, started over from scratch 3 times, and my current program Neurosis is about 3 years old, written and compiled with the Free-Pascal compiler.
It's a hobby, and therefore my goal isn't to write the strongest program in the world, rather to write a very solid and bugfree chessprogram, with a positional style that's also nice as a hunam to play against, so it has a lot of features to alter strength and style of play and so on.
It's not such an agressive searcher, some commercial topprograms prune extremely agressive and are able to see some lines very deep because of that, but also leave some holes in the search making them blind to certain theme's, and sometimes prune away quiet positional lines and ideas. Neurosis also has to take some risks in pruning to be able to reach some depth, but is affected a lot less because out of principle i want Neurosis to always be able to correctly solve any position given enough time.
Further Neurosis isn't such a fast searcher because of the positional style and knowledge i try to give it. Unfortunately more and more knowledge slows a program down, but it works well for Neurosis and together with new ideas for the searchtree it keeps getting stronger.
This tournament will be an interesting event, it will have a very strong international field. (for instance the number 1 and 2 of the last world-championship will be there.) It's like a normal chesstournament with chessboards and clocks, but each participant also has his computer on the table. Timecontrols of 90 minutes per side per game, three rounds a day.
Some topcontenders will be bringing dual/quad/8-way systems or worse :? , but unfortunately most amateurs like me are on a tighter budged and so i won't stand too much chance with my 2 year old laptop, :roll: still i hope to score a draw against one of the topcontenders, and one or two victories against participants out of the lower half of the field.
More info about and games and results during the tournament can be found here.: http://www.computerschaak.nl
If anyone's interested i'll post a report after the tournament.
Regards
On 11, 12 and 13 November, i will compete in the Leiden Dutch open computerchess-championship with my chessprogram Neurosis.
I started working on my first chessprogram about 5 years ago now, started over from scratch 3 times, and my current program Neurosis is about 3 years old, written and compiled with the Free-Pascal compiler.
It's a hobby, and therefore my goal isn't to write the strongest program in the world, rather to write a very solid and bugfree chessprogram, with a positional style that's also nice as a hunam to play against, so it has a lot of features to alter strength and style of play and so on.
It's not such an agressive searcher, some commercial topprograms prune extremely agressive and are able to see some lines very deep because of that, but also leave some holes in the search making them blind to certain theme's, and sometimes prune away quiet positional lines and ideas. Neurosis also has to take some risks in pruning to be able to reach some depth, but is affected a lot less because out of principle i want Neurosis to always be able to correctly solve any position given enough time.
Further Neurosis isn't such a fast searcher because of the positional style and knowledge i try to give it. Unfortunately more and more knowledge slows a program down, but it works well for Neurosis and together with new ideas for the searchtree it keeps getting stronger.
This tournament will be an interesting event, it will have a very strong international field. (for instance the number 1 and 2 of the last world-championship will be there.) It's like a normal chesstournament with chessboards and clocks, but each participant also has his computer on the table. Timecontrols of 90 minutes per side per game, three rounds a day.
Some topcontenders will be bringing dual/quad/8-way systems or worse :? , but unfortunately most amateurs like me are on a tighter budged and so i won't stand too much chance with my 2 year old laptop, :roll: still i hope to score a draw against one of the topcontenders, and one or two victories against participants out of the lower half of the field.
More info about and games and results during the tournament can be found here.: http://www.computerschaak.nl
If anyone's interested i'll post a report after the tournament.
Regards