The SSDF Chess Engine Rating List, 2019-02
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Draft – Not for Circulation
A Gross Miscarriage of Justice in Computer Chess by Dr. Søren Riis Introduction In June 2011 it was widely reported in the global media that the International Computer Games Association (ICGA) had found chess programmer International Master Vasik Rajlich in breach of the ICGA‟s annual World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) tournament rule related to program originality. In the ICGA‟s accompanying report it was asserted that Rajlich‟s chess program Rybka contained “plagiarized” code from Fruit, a program authored by Fabien Letouzey of France. Some of the headlines reporting the charges and ruling in the media were “Computer Chess Champion Caught Injecting Performance-Enhancing Code”, “Computer Chess Reels from Biggest Sporting Scandal Since Ben Johnson” and “Czech Mate, Mr. Cheat”, accompanied by a photo of Rajlich and his wife at their wedding. In response, Rajlich claimed complete innocence and made it clear that he found the ICGA‟s investigatory process and conclusions to be biased and unprofessional, and the charges baseless and unworthy. He refused to be drawn into a protracted dispute with his accusers or mount a comprehensive defense. This article re-examines the case. With the support of an extensive technical report by Ed Schröder, author of chess program Rebel (World Computer Chess champion in 1991 and 1992) as well as support in the form of unpublished notes from chess programmer Sven Schüle, I argue that the ICGA‟s findings were misleading and its ruling lacked any sense of proportion. The purpose of this paper is to defend the reputation of Vasik Rajlich, whose innovative and influential program Rybka was in the vanguard of a mid-decade paradigm change within the computer chess community. -
Move Similarity Analysis in Chess Programs
Move similarity analysis in chess programs D. Dailey, A. Hair, M. Watkins Abstract In June 2011, the International Computer Games Association (ICGA) disqual- ified Vasik Rajlich and his Rybka chess program for plagiarism and breaking their rules on originality in their events from 2006-10. One primary basis for this came from a painstaking code comparison, using the source code of Fruit and the object code of Rybka, which found the selection of evaluation features in the programs to be almost the same, much more than expected by chance. In his brief defense, Rajlich indicated his opinion that move similarity testing was a superior method of detecting misappropriated entries. Later commentary by both Rajlich and his defenders reiterated the same, and indeed the ICGA Rules themselves specify move similarity as an example reason for why the tournament director would have warrant to request a source code examination. We report on data obtained from move-similarity testing. The principal dataset here consists of over 8000 positions and nearly 100 independent engines. We comment on such issues as: the robustness of the methods (upon modifying the experimental conditions), whether strong engines tend to play more similarly than weak ones, and the observed Fruit/Rybka move-similarity data. 1. History and background on derivative programs in computer chess Computer chess has seen a number of derivative programs over the years. One of the first was the incident in the 1989 World Microcomputer Chess Cham- pionship (WMCCC), in which Quickstep was disqualified due to the program being \a copy of the program Mephisto Almeria" in all important areas. -
New Architectures in Computer Chess Ii New Architectures in Computer Chess
New Architectures in Computer Chess ii New Architectures in Computer Chess PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Tilburg, op gezag van de rector magnificus, prof. dr. Ph. Eijlander, in het openbaar te verdedigen ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties aangewezen commissie in de aula van de Universiteit op woensdag 17 juni 2009 om 10.15 uur door Fritz Max Heinrich Reul geboren op 30 september 1977 te Hanau, Duitsland Promotor: Prof. dr. H.J.vandenHerik Copromotor: Dr. ir. J.W.H.M. Uiterwijk Promotiecommissie: Prof. dr. A.P.J. van den Bosch Prof. dr. A. de Bruin Prof. dr. H.C. Bunt Prof. dr. A.J. van Zanten Dr. U. Lorenz Dr. A. Plaat Dissertation Series No. 2009-16 The research reported in this thesis has been carried out under the auspices of SIKS, the Dutch Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems. ISBN 9789490122249 Printed by Gildeprint © 2009 Fritz M.H. Reul All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronically, mechanically, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the author. Preface About five years ago I completed my diploma project about computer chess at the University of Applied Sciences in Friedberg, Germany. Immediately after- wards I continued in 2004 with the R&D of my computer-chess engine Loop. In 2005 I started my Ph.D. project ”New Architectures in Computer Chess” at the Maastricht University. In the first year of my R&D I concentrated on the redesign of a computer-chess architecture for 32-bit computer environments. -
FUEGO – an Open-Source Framework for Board Games and Go Engine Based on Monte-Carlo Tree Search
FUEGO – An Open-source Framework for Board Games and Go Engine Based on Monte-Carlo Tree Search Markus Enzenberger, Martin Muller,¨ Broderick Arneson and Richard Segal Abstract—FUEGO is both an open-source software frame- available source code such as Hoffmann’s FF [20] have had work and a state of the art program that plays the game of a similarly massive impact, and have enabled much followup Go. The framework supports developing game engines for full- research. information two-player board games, and is used successfully in UEGO a substantial number of projects. The FUEGO Go program be- F contains a game-independent, state of the art came the first program to win a game against a top professional implementation of MCTS with many standard enhancements. player in 9×9 Go. It has won a number of strong tournaments It implements a coherent design, consistent with software against other programs, and is competitive for 19 × 19 as well. engineering best practices. Advanced features include a lock- This paper gives an overview of the development and free shared memory architecture, and a flexible and general current state of the FUEGO project. It describes the reusable components of the software framework and specific algorithms plug-in architecture for adding domain-specific knowledge in used in the Go engine. the game tree. The FUEGO framework has been proven in applications to Go, Hex, Havannah and Amazons. I. INTRODUCTION The main innovation of the overall FUEGO framework may lie not in the novelty of any of its specific methods and Research in computing science is driven by the interplay algorithms, but in the fact that for the first time, a state of of theory and practice. -
Rybka Investigation and Summary of Findings for the ICGA Mark Lefler, Robert Hyatt, Harvey Williamson and ICGA Panel Members 12 May 2011
Rybka Investigation and Summary of Findings for the ICGA Mark Lefler, Robert Hyatt, Harvey Williamson and ICGA panel members 12 May 2011 1. Background 1.1 Purpose: To investigate claims that the chess playing program Rybka is a derivative of the chess programs Fruit and Crafty and violated International Computer Games Association (ICGA) Tournament rules. Rybka is a program by Vasik Rajlich. Fruit was written by Fabien Letouzey. Crafty was written by Robert Hyatt. 1.2 Allegations. Allegations have surfaced that Rybka 1.0 beta and later versions are derivatives of Fruit 2.1. Fruit 2.1 source code was distributed with a specific license in the copying.txt file. Part of this license reads: "For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights." Allegations point out that by distributing Rybka, if it is based on Fruit, this GNU license was violated (http://icga.wikispaces.com/Open+letter+to+the+ICGA+about+the+Rybka- Fruit+issue). If versions of Rybka are derived from Fruit and participated in ICGA tournaments, then Rybka has also violated ICGA Tournament Rules. Specifically, the rules state: "Each program must be the original work of the entering developers. Programming teams whose code is derived from or including game-playing code written by others must name all other authors, or the source of such code, in the details of their submission form. -
Beyond the 3000 Elo Barrier a Glance Behind the Scenes of the Rybka Chess Engine by HARALD FIETZ
Beyond the 3000 Elo barrier A glance behind the scenes of the Rybka chess engine by HARALD FIETZ t the end of 2005, the worked in the computer field. My looked very promising and scary for world of chess computers mother is also a trained mathematician. the opponent when I played them, but suddenly changed when an I have two younger brothers. We moved in a post-mortem Rybka sometimes engine with the name back to Prague when I was three weeks revealed them as crazy blunders. I A of Rybka appeared from old and stayed in the Czech Republic believe that using Rybka can help to virtually nowhere. At the prestigious until I was 11 The whole family develop an intuition about which International Paderborn Computer moved back to the USA at that time. I sacrifices actually work. For sure using Chess Championship the new program studied computer science at MIT Rybka has some influence on my by the American developer Vaclav (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) openings – I think that my repertoire is Rajlich – whom everybody simply calls near Boston and worked as a software getting much stronger thanks to my Vasik or Vas as his first name – won developer at Texas Instruments (Dallas, work with the engine.” a clear point ahead of established USA), Triada, a company specialized in machines such as Zappa, Spike, data compression, (Ypsilanti, USA), A programmer’s everyday life Shredder, Fruit or Jonny. Out of the Ford (Detroit, USA), at the Environ- and visions blue, Rybka skyrocketed to the top of mental Research Institute of Michigan, the Swedish computer rating list, which was developing radar imaging However, the improvement of a which had been regarded for a long systems (Ann Arbor, USA), and Option, sophisticated program also requires a time as the equivalent of the FIDE a leading company in the field of lot of support from other sources: rating list in the chess computer sector wireless communication technology “There are tons of people who are (cp.http://web.telia.com/~u85924109/ss (Adelsried, Germany), over the last involved in the project in various ways. -
Imperial College London Arxiv:1509.01549V2 [Cs.AI] 14 Sep
Imperial College London Department of Computing Giraffe: Using Deep Reinforcement Learning to Play Chess by Matthew Lai Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the MSc Degree in arXiv:1509.01549v2 [cs.AI] 14 Sep 2015 Advanced Computing of Imperial College London September 2015 Abstract This report presents Giraffe, a chess engine that uses self-play to discover all its domain-specific knowledge, with minimal hand-crafted knowledge given by the pro- grammer. Unlike previous attempts using machine learning only to perform parameter- tuning on hand-crafted evaluation functions, Giraffe’s learning system also performs automatic feature extraction and pattern recognition. The trained evaluation function performs comparably to the evaluation functions of state-of-the-art chess engines - all of which containing thousands of lines of carefully hand-crafted pattern recognizers, tuned over many years by both computer chess experts and human chess masters. Giraffe is the most successful attempt thus far at using end-to-end machine learning to play chess. We also investigated the possibility of using probability thresholds instead of depth to shape search trees. Depth-based searches form the backbone of virtually all chess engines in existence today, and is an algorithm that has become well-established over the past half century. Preliminary comparisons between a basic implementation of probability-based search and a basic implementation of depth-based search showed that our new probability-based approach performs moderately better than the established approach. There are also evidences suggesting that many successful ad-hoc add-ons to depth-based searches are generalized by switching to a probability-based search. -
Gentlemen, Stop Your Engines!
CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Central Archive at the University of Reading 150 ICGA Journal September 2007 GENTLEMEN, STOP YOUR ENGINES! G. M cC. Haworth1 Reading, England ABSTRACT For fifty years, computer chess has pursued an original goal of Artificial Intelligence, to produce a chess-engine to compete at the highest level. The goal has arguably been achieved, but that success has made it harder to answer questions about the relative playing strengths of man and machine. The proposal here is to approach such questions in a counter-intuitive way, handicapping or stopping-down chess engines so that they play less well. The intrinsic lack of man-machine games may be side-stepped by analysing existing games to place computer- engines as accurately as possible on the FIDE ELO scale of human play. Move-sequences may also be assessed for likelihood if computer-assisted cheating is suspected. 1. INTRODUCTION The recently celebrated Dartmouth Summer Workshop of 1956 (Moor, 2006) coined the term Artificial Intelli- gence. The AI goal most clearly defined was to create a chess engine to compete at the highest level. Moore’s law plus new versions and types of chess engine such as FRUIT, RYBKA and ZAPPA, have increased the likeli- hood that this goal has now been reached. Ironically, recent silicon successes in man-machine play have made this claim harder to verify as there is now a distinct lack of enthusiasm on the human side for such matches, especially extended ones. Past encounters have often been marred by clear blunders2, highlighting the unsatis- factory nature of determining the competence of homo sapiens by the transitory performance of one individual. -
Draft – Not for Circulation
Søren Riis is a Computer Scientist at Queen Mary University of London. He has a PhD in Maths from University of Oxford. He used to play competitive chess (Elo 2300). A Gross Miscarriage of Justice in Computer Chess by Dr. Søren Riis Introduction In June 2011 it was widely reported in the global media that the International Computer Games Association (ICGA) had found chess programmer International Master Vasik Rajlich in breach of the ICGA’s annual World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) tournament rule related to program originality. In the ICGA’s accompanying report it was asserted that Rajlich’s chess program Rybka contained “plagiarized” code from Fruit, a program authored by Fabien Letouzey of France. Some of the headlines reporting the charges and ruling in the media were “Computer Chess Champion Caught Injecting Performance-Enhancing Code”, “Computer Chess Reels from Biggest Sporting Scandal Since Ben Johnson” and “Czech Mate, Mr. Cheat”, accompanied by a photo of Rajlich and his wife at their wedding. In response, Rajlich claimed complete innocence and made it clear that he found the ICGA’s investigatory process and conclusions to be biased and unprofessional, and the charges baseless and unworthy. He refused to be drawn into a protracted dispute with his accusers or mount a comprehensive defense. In his only public statement on the matter to date he said Rybka does not include game-playing code written by others, aside from standard exceptions which wouldn’t count as ‘game-playing’. Rajlich added that the ICGA’s action would not deter him from continuing to improve Rybka and sell it commercially, as he has done successfully for the past five years, and that his program would be willing to compete in a match or tournament with any worthy challenger. -
The SSDF Rating List, 2019-07
The SSDF rating list, 2019-07 Article Accepted Version Sandin, L. and Haworth, G. (2019) The SSDF rating list, 2019- 07. ICGA Journal, 41 (3). p. 177. ISSN 1389-6911 doi: https://doi.org/10.3233/ICG-190113 Available at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/85331/ It is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the work. See Guidance on citing . Published version at: https://content.iospress.com/articles/icga-journal/icg190113 To link to this article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3233/ICG-190113 Publisher: The International Computer Games Association All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law. Copyright and IPR is retained by the creators or other copyright holders. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the End User Agreement . www.reading.ac.uk/centaur CentAUR Central Archive at the University of Reading Reading’s research outputs online THE SSDF RATING LIST 2019-07-08 150612 games played by 384 computers Rating + - Games Won Oppo ------ --- --- ----- --- ---- 1 Stockfish 10 x64 1800X 3.6 GHz 3529 33 -31 577 72% 3365 2 Stockfish 9 x64 1800X 3.6 GHz 3493 30 -28 722 73% 3315 3 Komodo 13.02 x64 1800X 3.6 GHz 3482 52 -48 200 61% 3402 4 Komodo 12.3 x64 1800X 3.6 GHz 3454 28 -26 720 67% 3328 5 Stockfish 9 x64 Q6600 2.4 GHz 3445 34 -33 431 57% 3399 6 Komodo 12.3 x64 Q6600 2.4 GHz 3443 43 -41 280 59% 3382 7 Stockfish 8 x64 1800X 3.6 GHz 3432 26 -24 1100 77% 3217 8 Komodo 13.02 MCTS x64 1800X 3.6 GHz 3424 51 -48 205 62% 3334 9 Stockfish 8 x64 Q6600 2.4 -
Gnuchess.Pdf
GNU Chess for version 6.2.8, 24 March 2021 http://www.gnu.org/software/chess This manual is for GNU Chess (version 6.2.8, 24 March 2021), which is a complete chess program, frequently used as a chess engine. Copyright c 2001{2021 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled \GNU Free Documentation License". i Table of Contents 1 Overview :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 1 2 Contact info ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 2 3 Running gnuchess ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 3 3.1 Invoking gnuchess :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 3 3.2 Interactive game ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 4 3.3 Command list :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 4 3.4 Environment variables:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 7 3.5 Configuration file::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 7 3.5.1 Structure:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 7 3.5.2 Options ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 8 3.5.3 Workarounds ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 11 3.6 Output files ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 12 3.7 XBoard chess engine :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 13 3.8 UCI chess engine:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: -
No Miscarriage of Justice - Just Biased Reporting
No Miscarriage of Justice - Just Biased Reporting By David Levy [ICGA President] Introduction In his four-part article on Chessbase.com about the Rybka scandal (see www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7791 et seq.) Dr Søren Riis has tried very hard to defend Vasik Ralich’s actions that led the ICGA to find him guilty of breaking ICGA Tournament Rule 2. As a historical review of progress in computer chess Riis’s article contains important and interesting information and comments. Unfortunately, however, his thesis lacks objectivity because it circles the core question and attempts to defend Rajlich by attacking the rule he was accused of breaking, attacking the investigative process in various ways and attacking some of those involved in that process. When a defendant is brought before a court of Law, what is in question is whether or not (s)he broke the Law and not whether the Law itself is appropriate. And so it is with the ICGA rules. In considering the Rybka case the ICGA’s task was to decide the matter on the basis of its Tournament Rule 2, not to question the rule itself. ICGA Tournament Rule 2 applies to the World Computer Chess Championships and states: “Each program must be the original work of the entering developers. Programming teams whose code is derived from or including game-playing code written by others must name all other authors, or the source of such code, in their submission details. Programs which are discovered to be close derivatives of others (e.g., by playing nearly all moves the same), may be declared invalid by the Tournament Director after seeking expert advice.