Below text was already published by Ed.
I dont have anymore up-to-date matches against FLits and Truus.
Before Ed and myself developed the Truus and Flits DXP server, i played several smaller matches, which were (after several improvements) all won by Damage.
And the games played against Dam (sorry to say , as I really value Harm), were a complete disaster for Dam, so I even dont like to mention scores.
See below text from Ed regarding to the last Damge-Kingsrow match (played over the Internet, and most likely the first transatlantic Draughts DXP match):
Bert
Kingsrow and damage played another internet engine match last weekend. This was I think the fourth match of this type. The most recent one previously was played in July 2008. New for damage is a 7pc endgame db and some eval improvements. New for kingsrow is a full 8pc db and also eval improvements.
In the previous matches we purposely setup both engines to be configured as simlar as possible, so no pondering, both using 6pc databases, and single-threaded search. This time I decided to use a more fully configured kingsrow, so it ran with 4 search threads, pondering on, and using the full 8pc db plus the 5men vs. 4men subset of the 9pc db, running on a 2.4GHz Q6600 with 8GB ram. Damage ran a single search thread on (IIRC) a 3GHz I7 with 6GB ram.
Time controls were the same as previous matches. Kingsrow was setup to make 75 moves in 10 minutes. Damage does not have this type of total match time management, so it was set for 10 seconds per move. This is more than 10 minutes for 75 moves but as most games are shorter this made the average time used about the same for both.
The results for kingsrow vs. damage: 24 wins, 4 losses, 130 draws, 0 unknowns.
While this looks good for kingsrow, it represents a noticeable improvement for damage. The results of the previous match were +30, -3, =123, U2, and this time kingsrow had some endgame db, pondering, and parallel search advantages that it did not have in previous matches. It is difficult to draw conclusions because there is a lot of randomness in the results from "only" 158 games, but from these results is looks probable that damage is improving more quickly than kingsrow.
We had 2 interruptions during the match. After about 20 games, damage crashed with what Bert thinks is an endgame database driver bug. He had seen this before and he has been trying to fix it, but it happens randomly and not very often, so it is difficult to troubleshoot. The other interruption occured after about 100 games. Bert's local internet service was down for a short period. He could not access the internet at all, and our Dam Exchange connection was lost. After it was restored we reconnected and resumed, there were no further interruptions.
These matches are always interesting and entertaining to watch, and I spent quite a few hours over the weekend just watching the games. I have been recovering from a broken bone in my foot, the result of a running injury, and I'm not too mobile at the moment anyway, so this was a nice way for me to spend some recovery time. Bert and I communicated during the match via Yahoo Messenger, and as always the conversations were lively. Among other things we started brainstorming about ways to create a Flits Dxp server, something similar to what we had created for Truus. We are persuing a few ideas and maybe something useful will eventually develop from it.
-- Ed
