World Draughts Forum

I never understood the weird time-control with a fixed time and a fixed number of moves which often produces unknown results. Fisher time-control with increment is the only way to go. Joost, I agree completely.

Kingsrow does not clear the hashtable between games. If you use an aging mechanism then ...

Especially the last position, with the black king on square 4, a network will struggle greatly with this.
Yes, I think all engines will struggle with this. Kingsrow has no positional eval for kings at all, only material. Even the old HCE had nothing to deal with it.
Perhaps the networks learn that ...

Joost Buijs wrote: Thu Jul 23, 2026 17:09 This is a nice story about vibe coding: https://brandonharris.io/Garbage-Pail-Code/

Thanks Joost, that was very entertaining!

Here is one more:

lopsided7.png
[FEN "W:W31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50:B1,2,3,K4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,17,18,19"]
It may not be clear from the image, but there is a black king on 4.

16 wins, 12 losses, 10 draws, 2 unknowns
All but 1 of the wins were black wins.

There has been a lot of discussion on this board about the problem that the strong engines always draw when they play another strong engine in a tournament. A few months ago I ran some experiments to see if this problem could be addressed using somewhat lopsided start positions. Below is a summary ...

CheckersGuy wrote: Mon Jul 06, 2026 18:10 The dll was probably not part of the checkerboard implementation in the past, right ?

Yes. Cake is part of the CheckerBoard install, and in 2021 Martin started using the egdb dll, so it was added to the CB install. Of course it was always part of the kingsrow install.

Bert, the egdb dll is included as part of the CheckerBoard installation, so it's not really necessary to have it in an engine distribution.

Robin, congrats on DarkHorse, it sounds like it is very strong, and I am looking forward to trying it. My computer has been tied up recently building more databases, but it will be finished soon and then I can start doing some of the other projects that I have been postponing.
Thanks for sharing ...

I have the Dragon 2 through 7 pieces db on Mega here: https://mega.nz/file/iAB2DCRK#Xk4G6XQRM ... 86zwghkofE

I documented the DXP additions for Fischer time control in a forum post 10 years ago. I will paste it below. Also, to enable its use in kingsrow, there needs to be a file named "kingsrow.ini" in the directory Documents\Ed Gilbert\Kingsrow International. An empty file will work.

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I added ...

Gijsbert, thank you for posting some of the details about how you interact with Codex. Very helpful.
I tried version 1.7 of the GUI and got tournaments running with mobydam. It turns out I had misunderstood your instructions for interfacing to mobydam and had not changed the setting of gui-send ...

Version 1.4 is published on github. You should be able to play a match between Kingsrow and Mobydam with this version.
I have downloaded GWGUI version 1.6 and started to play with it. I am trying to run a hub tournament between kingsrow and the latest version of moby dam, Moby Dam_May 15 2026. The ...

Good point, currently 'go ponder' behaves as 'go analyze'. Perhaps we can have a quick show of hands here: do all engines support 'go analyze', so when browsing a game the GUI continuously sends 'go analyze'? 'go ponder' should work as Harm/UCI mentions?

Kingsrow supports both go analyze and go ...

I have tested this version with the latest mobydam.exe, and mobydam requires 'hub' as the first argument to launch it in hub mode. 'We' have added that option to the engine-parameters dialog box, so before you open mobydam you first edit the engine-parameters and set 'launch-hub-argument' to 'hub ...

I found the root cause. My 'International Draughts GUI' was sending a 'K' after a promotion. GWD didn't care but Kingsrow does.

Ah good. I was almost finished typing a rather long response when I saw that you found the problem.

In general I think you should only send the most recent moves ...