Re: Help Bot Advice adopted.

Sanny wrote:
>>   Many years ago, a fellow came from out
>> of nowhere with achessprogram that was
>> stronger than all the others.  It had a nice
>> GUI, nicerchesspieces than the number
>> two program, and most curious of all, it fit
>> on a single floppy disk as it was quite
>> small in addition to searching faster.
> 
> Even GetClub Chess Program will fit in a floppy Disk
> 
> GetClub Chess Program Size is Just 200 KB. While a Floppy can take 1.2
> MB. So you can pack 5 Chess Programs in a floppy.
> 
> The thing is that the size is small but the complexity is very high.
> 
> I think GetClub program is good enough for all Human Players. Only the
> player using other commercial programs are beating the higher levels.

That seems very unlikely given that it is so predictable about 
sacrificing N for 2P and going for spite checks. Its endgame play is 
complete rubbish (but then even the top engines are still a little bit 
flakey there at tournament time controls) I'd be surprised if it could 
beat most serious club players reliably looking at the recent games.

I think it will now comfortably beat all casual chess players, but I 
think anyone at ELO 2000+ will crush it (excluding careless slip ups).
> 
> Only you are able to win the Master Level rest all are not going
> higher than Normal Level.

That is more because the humans die of boredom waiting for GetClub to 
make a move at the higher levels. You would do well to find a couple of 
local club level chess players with some mathematics or programming 
background if you actually want to make the program stronger.

Playing toy matches and tweaking things isn't the right approach.

If you are serious you need to get a set of test cases that it should be 
able to solve and regression test the engine against them after each 
"improvement" - that way you can be sure you *are* making things better.

Some of the positions I have already picked out would be good ones to 
have in your test suite.

A first step towards this is to allow the engine to accept FEN notation 
for game positions and set up the board at the test position. Then a 
modification so that you can display a table of move score in cp ranked 
by evaluation as a function of search depth.

And underneath the time taken, number of nodes processed and terminal 
nodes evaluated (this may require adding diagnostics to your code).

eg.
Ply:   1     2    3    4    5    6
e4    05
d4    03
c4    00
Nf3  -01
....
Nodes
Evals
Time
(this table should be sorted by the deepest evaluation available)

The objective is to try and get the ply 1 evaluation to be self 
consistent with the deeper evaluations and so minimise the number of 
nodes the program has to evaluate to get to a given depth.

The maximum depth examined by selective extensions is also possibly 
useful here too. We need to see how it is thinking and what its internal 
evaluation is for the moves to be able to give sensible advice.

Regards,
Martin Brown
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