Vibe Coding

[BertTuyt]

Michel, interesting result.
So KR is still (around) 29 ELO better compared with Dragon 4.8
The Dragon 5.0 - 4.8 match revealed a result of ELO = 49, but with increasing time (like 1 min/game) this will become smaller.
So curious what KR - Dragon 5.0 will bring.

In all tests done, I was never able to surpass KR with many points, or with a large ELO margin.
The last time that we have seen a jump in playing strength was in 2015 with Scan from Fabien.

Sometimes Damage has a a 1 win and 157 draws, and the other time 2 losses and 1 win, and 155 draws (all perspective Damage).
So most likely break even.
Or too close to call with 158 games.

This tend me to believe that we have reached the maximum, but I hope some engines (like Dragon) prove the opposite.

Bert

[Joost Buijs]

I don't think any significant improvement is possible because this game contains too many mechanisms that lead to draws.

Kingsrow loses at most about 1% of its one-minute-per-move games when running on a single thread. It might be possible to gain another 5 Elo or so, but that's really the limit.

Playing matches from unbalanced starting positions is just a stopgap measure; it doesn't solve the underlying problem. The only real solution is to change the rules of the game so that it becomes less draw-prone.

Naturally, the draughts community has no appetite for such a radical solution as changing the rules of the game, so that's the end of the story.

[orac81]

Derek Oldbury always advocated the "spot behind the last man" rule used in 8x8 pool draughts, a fair number of players used this rule. The rule is you must land immediately behind the last piece in a capture sequence, I understand it forces more wins.

[BertTuyt]

I think it is called Killer Draughts. Not 100% sure but I believe if the last captured piece was a king, the "attacker" king should stop after that piece.
We did not embark on this journey yet, although Dragon and Scan have endgame databases based upon this principle.

Bert

[BertTuyt]

Hi Bert,

What are the results if you use 1 minute/75 moves? If I use 5 min/80 moves GWD draws all the time against Kingsrow, with 1 minute/75 moves sometimes GWD loses a game (but also sometimes wins).

GW

Gijsbert, the test I did this afternoon with 1 min/80 moves, 1 core , 6p db, both book, and Damage 18.6 did not use a permanent hash. This means every new search, the hashtable was build up again. I did not clear the hashtable, only increased the age, and only accepted search-results for the same age. Background, if i see a weird move, i can start from that position and get the same result.

KR - Damage 18.6 8 wins - 2 losses - 148 draws. So ELO wise around 13.

Bert

[MatteoRaso]

Besides engines, I was able to get GPT-5.6-Sol to create a tablebase generator for both Brazilian and international draughts. I gave it instructions about how I wanted the generator to function, but the AI had a lot of discretion on how to implement the codebase. To give you some idea of my abilities, I'm decent at Python, but I have no experience with C++. Truth be told, I wouldn't have been able to make this at all with my level of coding skills. Remarkably, even after setting the reasoning level to `xhigh` and giving Sol access to the web (both of which massively increase the number of tokens used), it only cost me about a cent to make. If any of you are interested in checking it out, I open-sourced the entire project.

https://github.com/MatteoRaso/draughts-tb