Dragon

[Krzychumag]

I have Michel to you such a question and the request. On the website you are writing " Please note that in these tournaments dragon plays with extra tables (evaluation and breaktrough), which significantly increase dragon's playing strength. The tables are not in the downloadable version, because of the huge memory and disk-space requirements" - whether you can write which have a volume (in the GB) these tables have.

- Krzysztof.

[MichelG]

The tables are actually not that big (210 MB). But:
- they take a long to load when the program starts
- they use about 1 GB of ram
- the difference with the smaller tables that are in version 4.1 is only about 40 elo points.

NB: version 4.0 of dragon did not include any of the tables. Version 4.1 uses a small version of them.

At some point, it's a matter of cost/benefit. Like using bigger breakthrough or endgame tables, the program can get a bit stronger, but at a huge costs of download/memory size.

[Krzychumag]

The tables are actually not that big (210 MB). But:
- they take a long to load when the program starts
- they use about 1 GB of ram
- the difference with the smaller tables that are in version 4.1 is only about 40 elo points.

NB: version 4.0 of dragon did not include any of the tables. Version 4.1 uses a small version of them.

At some point, it's a matter of cost/benefit. Like using bigger breakthrough or endgame tables, the program can get a bit stronger, but at a huge costs of download/memory size.

I thank for the reply Michel. I have request Michel, and you can make these tables available in the unabridged version (210 MB). I thank for versions of program 4.1.1

- Krzysztof.

[Rein Halbersma]

Hi Michel,

I have installed the trial version of your latest Dragon release. However, the endgame generator repeatedly crashes after about half an hour, when trying to create the 6 piece endgame databases. I run on Win7 64-bit Pro, Xeon E5-1650 @3.2 Ghz + 32Gb of RAM. I build the endgames with 10 out of the 12 threads available from your command line tool, but I get the same crash after about 2-3 hours when I run it directly from the GUI (with less cores).

My question: is this due to the fact that I have a trial version or is it a bug, or more likely some failure on my system?

Rein

[MichelG]

Hi Michel,
My question: is this due to the fact that I have a trial version or is it a bug, or more likely some failure on my system?
Rein

What i notice is that when you generate the database from the gui, the databases do get generated correctly, but the GUI itself crashes. Does the same happen to you?

I'll try to look in to it further.

[Rein Halbersma]

Hi Michel,
My question: is this due to the fact that I have a trial version or is it a bug, or more likely some failure on my system?
Rein

What i notice is that when you generate the database from the gui, the databases do get generated correctly, but the GUI itself crashes. Does the same happen to you?

I'll try to look in to it further.

I do get a whole bunch of .raw files in the rd2 folder, but not everything. When I restart the process (from the cmd window using `cores 10`, then `make 6` it will typically start with some 4 vs 2 endgame and then crash again. Haven't managed to complete it.

Rein

[Krzychumag]

Hi Michel.

I have such a question Michel. During the game with other program with the protocol damexchange for 1 minute program the Dragon very often is hanging himself. What can be too reason for such a error.

[MichelG]

Hi Michel.

I have such a question Michel. During the game with other program with the protocol damexchange for 1 minute program the Dragon very often is hanging himself. What can be too reason for such a error.

I tried and played 500 games against kingsrow last weekend at 1 minute/game, but i had no problems. Against which opponent do you experience this problem?

Michel

[BertTuyt]

Michel with respect to

I tried and played 500 games against kingsrow last weekend at 1 minute/game, but i had no problems. Against which opponent do you experience this problem?

could you share the results of the 500+ games against kingsrow.

Bert

[MichelG]

Michel with respect to
could you share the results of the 500+ games against kingsrow.

Bert

I was just a match to test the stability of the program. I had some features switched off and I didn't write down the result. I know kingsrow won though.

[Krzychumag]

Hi Rein.

I have such a question. Whether you generated 6-piece endgame databases in the program Dragon.

--Krzysztof.

[Krzychumag]

Hi Michel.

Unfortunately there are program errors still. During the game with other program he appears such windows (different windows) and the program farther isn't already playing.



--Krzysztof.

[MichelG]

Hi Michel.

Unfortunately there are program errors still. During the game with other program he appears such windows (different windows) and the program farther isn't already playing.

I think i found the problem and i will fix it in the next release. (which should be soon)

[MichelG]

Dragon 4.1.3 is available for download from http://mdgsoft.home.xs4all.nl/draughts/install.html

This release addresses several bugs and improves playing strength

Interface changes:
* improved pdn import for files generated by Turbo dambase
* damexchange: minor bugfixes
* damexchange: dragon now limits the amount of hash tables it uses if it thinks the setting is too high (using too large tables will hurt performance)
* cleaned up some of the extended statistics

Engine changes: (resulting in about 30-50 elo points strength improvement)
* increased performance: about 50% more evaluations per second
* improvements in evaluation function
* fixed a bug that caused dragon to occasionally play a random (bad) move

Notes:
- Please note that Dragon performs best on multicore-64 bit systems
- Some users expercience problems when generating endgame databases. This is still unresolved

[Krzychumag]

Hi Michel

I played 5 parties with the latest version of the program Dragon 4.1.3, unfortunately not a single one time didn't win the program or not-losed of party, each time the program is suspended. I am sending the file dmp file so that you can see what the mistake causes. I will add that I played the with the system Windows 7 64 bit from 16 GB of the memory of frames from 6-piece endgame databases.

dragon64r.exe.628.dmp

--Krzysztof.