HAL9000

HAL9000
"It just isn't conceivable that you can design a program strong enough to beat players like me."

April 18, 2015

RAPIDROID: Change of the rule

I'm quite unhappy to delay a new release of Rapidroid nowadays.

There are two reasons of the unexpected fact:
1) Extreme load at work. Classical. Almost no free time left except sundays.
2) Engines terminating games on their own.

The first issue can be somehow bypassed when automated tourneys run without early terminations. As this is linked to the solution of the second issue, i must do something with the bad boys, be it something radical.

Therefore, i've decided to exclude all engines that don't play games until checkmate, regardless of the correctness of their behaviour, of course except for legal resigns which remain allowed.

This change will trim down the engine fleet but i have no other choice to ensure the whole experiment progresses as scheduled.

The first victim is Sjaak 1.0 which caused me a lot of replays. I tried UCI and XB on all three processors i'm using but found no way to get it playing reliably. I don't see why it stops when the eval is just +2.00 something.

The rule now changes to: Only the engines which play until checkmate can be selected to play in Rapidroid. Exceptional early terminations are limited to maximum 5% of whole games played by the engine. Beyond 5%, the engine will be deleted from the database and the ranking. Above rule doesn't apply to resigns complying with the protocol being used.

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