World Draughts Forum

Interesting. What would be the total execution time for the 8 piece endings?

One tip on compression: dragon does not store the position that are not quiet, instead it looks that up by first performing the capture.

If you add that, you can replace the values of all capture positions by whatever ...

I think Rein's estimate of doubling every 18 weeks is fairly good on the spot.

The current AI compared to that in februari this year is already incredable. Recursive self improvement is on the horizon in my opinion, where AI will write the next generation of AI's. (and do that in a loop)

Only ...

Out of curiosity I let Codex design a neural network implementation with exactly the same parameters that the Ares network uses.

First of all, the code generated by Codex contains a lot of unnecessary crap that will only hurt performance. Secondly, it was not able to generate code that comes ...

Hi Michel,

What weights to use please?
I launched et dxp match and so "missing weights, poor performance"

Friendly, Sidiki

Hi Sidiki,

You can ignore the warnings. They are about the old evaluation function, but dragon does not use them any more. I will remove the messages in a new version ...

Michel, thanks for sharing.
What is ELO wise still the gap compared with KR, with 1 core 1 min games, or a similar setup?

Bert


Against kingsrow, dragon is losing about one in 6 games, for fisher time 1 sec+0.1 sec, single core.

I intent do tests against scan 3.1 only, as that is easier to ...

You can download version 5.0: https://www.mdgsoftware.nl/draughts/index.html

* New, stronger evaluation function
* fixed bug for thread selection on 14, 18 core machines
* split between for cpu's SSE2 and AVX2 support (avx2) avx2 is +8% faster
* Installer now uses PGO version for +5% speed ...

Dragon can, but you need to put a pdn file with the positions in the dxp directory. I forgot to add that to the installer.

I will fix in the next update, working on that.

You will also be able to run damexchange directly from the engine, for any list of pdn files. No GUI overhead. Just start the ...

I often let the engine play games of 10 sec. with 0.1 sec. increment, usually that doesn't give problems. The only problem that arises is when the program starts using endgame databases, then it will suddenly take a long time to load and decompress them, only a pre-loaded 6P EGDB (or less) will ...

How about a match at 1 second+0.1 second per move? With incremental time control you also don't need to stop at 75 moves, just let the engine run until the 25 move rule forces a draw.

I am up for it. It would take some modifications for me though. Currently the GUI would eat up the thinking time ...

BertTuyt wrote: Thu Jul 30, 2026 17:44 It is like restricting the Formula-1 cars to 10 liter fuel only.....

Yeah, but now it it like a 100 meter running match and then rounding to the nearest second to determen who wins.

BertTuyt wrote: Thu Jul 30, 2026 17:41 Or that we all acquire vintage computers from the 1990-1995 era, like a 386, and limit ourselves to Borland Compilers.
And that we conclude that at 6-ply we really see interesting games, with many decisive games.

Run a competition on an c64 emulator

Michel

Dragon supports fractional times, down to 0.5 minutes (see my suggestion in 2014). Damexchange allows down to 0.6 seconds/game.

Are there any other programs that support fractional minutes? Ill remove the 30 seconds limit on next version.

Michel

One way out is playing faster games, 1 minute is long already, but Bert's 5 minutes is like an eternity.

Matches at 1 to 5 seconds per game are much better in my opinion, and you don't need to change the rules.

Only thing is, that this can be difficult to enforce from a hub standpoint, because of ...

Michel, I'm really curious what Dragon 5.0 will bring to the table.....

Bert


Well I am still catching up. There were no improvements the last 8 years.

The training dataset is still beiing computed. I took an earlier checkpoint based on 300 milion positions and did a match against kingsrow at ...

For me, Codex 5.5 was a big enabler. It allowed big functions or small programs to be written. After creating, maybe requiring a 100 prompts to tune to perfection.

5.6 was to first to enable whole programs to be written, without even needing to look at the source, and then tens of prompts to tune ...