World Draughts Forum

The forum appears to have crashed and we lost a day of messages. I copy mine just below --- Thanks to Rein for showing this, as I'm not following chess news. What's amazing is the speed; the rest might not be so important in comparison. The screenshot reveals MNPS range, in line with classic/pattern...

And what will happen if the engine repeats the same position three times. It's up to the user or interface to interpret the result, not the engine. The engine will just keep playing moves. Its job is to play, not organise tournaments. It's possible that, even after all those years, you are still co...

Scan is an engine, and that means it is simplified in various ways. Engines like Scan do not know that they are playing a game; you give them a position, and they answer a move. So it's up to the interface or the user to interpret the result; Scan will always play a move no matter what (not offer dr...

Madeleine Birchfield wrote: ↑

Thu Aug 27, 2020 19:04

The major draughts engines, such as Scan, Kingsrow, Damage, Dragon, et cetera, all seem to be closed source. Are there any open source draughts engines out there?

Scan and Moby Dam are open source:
https://hjetten.home.xs4all.nl/

Especially the Kata-go paper link is interesting to read: it emphasizes using human ingenuity to come up with better NN primitives to accelerate learning. It should be right up your ally to see how this can be applied to draughts. The way I see it, DeepMind's MO has always been (so far?) to not opt...

There are no high-performance AlphaZero draughts programs yet. Last year, there were two candidate projects I was associated with (mostly at the advice level): one by Facebook, and one by the author of Galvanise-zero (G0) that I already mentioned on this forum. Unfortunately they were both terminat...

So it is up to the TD, in our case that means Krzysztof. Not sure I still like to compete myself. I have a magic trick to cheer people up, I just show them a part of my life. Years ago, Sidiki and I (independently) told everyone that Edeon Sport was using Scan 2's eval. What did Krzysztof do? He pa...

... I am surprised that this would be allowed, i.e. to call the result your original work. But if the community and in particular the lead programmer think it is fair then who am I to complain? Since the topic of fairness was brought up I wanted to include ML in the discussion. So to make it concre...

Just to establish some rules, would you say it is allowed if I take Scan's eval, change some features but still use your eval file, put that in my own search and use that to play my first million training games? I consider that using ML at all, especially when home-written, is enough to justify som...

For me, the key is how much Ed's code is actually contributing to Bert's evaluation weights. From the following quote from Bert (that I have no reason to doubt), it's focusing on the maths part. I feel that it's fine in this case, and this also goes in the direction Rein is advocating, that many 3rd...

For instance : how do the current best engine versions (of the strongest engines) compare to Scan 2.0 ? I first thought your post was focused on human/computer comparisons (which I don't think exist), and missed that last line. Scan 3 was a big jump in 2017, so programs are still making progress. I...

Also find out if I can improved the speed for the AMD (so replace PEXT). Scan doesn't use PEXT. Not only it's crippled on AMD, as you just noticed, but it won't scale in a world that will increasingly use ARM (which has bit reverse BTW). Here is an explanation that I sent to Rein a few years ago; h...

Do I understand correctly Bert that your training games were played with the handcrafted Damage evaluation function? I used two batches, the first with material-only evaluation and the second with the evaluation trained from the first batch, so bootstrapping from zero knowledge. What I usually do i...

Hi Bert, An interesting research question is , if there is further improvement when one further increases the win/lose ratio (for example do not include any draws), or if there is an optimum. I remember trying skipping draws, calling the label target "Wilo" (win/loss), in hope that this component wo...

Ed Gilbert wrote: ↑

Mon Sep 09, 2019 12:09

What is the end position of that game?

I don't have it; the game has been replaced.