Winboard Forum

This thread will gather all your testing results and build up a Lars Scale Rankings list.

If you have no idea what The Lars Scale of Lousiness rankings are, learn more about it in this thread.
If you want to start ranking engines, you'll need to download the Lars Points Calculator in this thread.
The official version used for this list is Lars Points Calculator v0.4.

REMINDER
The Lars Scale of Lousiness is intended to replace the now aging (and not lousy enough) Elo rating scale as this one doesn't reflect well the psychological impact the engine produces on the user's state of mind. Yes, Elo is quite accurate to rank human players, but when it comes to engines it just isn't. 99.99% of users, when playing an engine will just have the following opinion regarding its strength : "dude, this thing just screw*d me badly!", the engine being worth 1500 Elo or 3000 Elo just making no difference at all.
So we needed a vastly more accurate and adequate ranking system in order to really grasp the user experience. And what does a user really experience when playing against an engine? Well, many things can happen : "this sh*t just won"t run!", "gaahhh, this cr*p remains in memory now!", "huh? Since when can a Nb1 capture my Ke8???", and so on... This is all what really matters to the user, and this is what we aimed our new ranking system to when we designed it. Hopefully we reached our goal.

Also... It will be best if the author of the engine himself publish its Lars ranking in this list, as he has a better understanding of his engine's internals.

Here comes the list, now :

(this list is sorted from the funniest engines to the most boring ones. If you wondered.)

[*] 2840 - Moron 1.0
[*] 2458 - LUCI v3
[*] 2015 - ShouldntExist 0.1
[*] 2003 - GetClub chess
[*] 1960 - ShouldntExist 0.2
[*] 1446 - Youk
[*] 1368 - Tony 0.02
[*] 1228 - Sidonia 0073
[*] 0952 - Prédateur 2.1b
[*] 0826 - Firefly 2.5.7b8
[*] 0731 - Dirty 11D-27
[*] 0621 - EveAnn 1.64
[*] 0618 - Cheng 3
[*] 0493 - Myrdin 0.85
[*] 0416 - Bobcat 201102_dev
[*] 0408 - Frenzee
[*] 0372 - iCE 0.2

JuLieN wrote:... Lars Scale Rankings list..

I suspect ths rating list to be a clone of something... ^^

Volker Pittlik wrote:

JuLieN wrote:... Lars Scale Rankings list..

I suspect ths rating list to be a clone of something... ^^

I don't see at all where you're going to, my dear mister!

Hi! I am new to this board, but I think my engine has broken the illustrious record score. Here are my results:

ShouldntExist 0.1 scored 2015 Lars Points!
ShouldntExist 0.2 scored 1960 Lars Points!

I first released it via this CCC post. I linked to a bug-fix release one page later in the same thread. Even if I revert to the first public version, I have a lot of room for improved lousiness, but I probably cannot achieve the theoretical maximum without a rewrite. I wish my competitors the best of luck.

Justin

Congrats, Justin! We have a new champion! Looong live the Lousy!

And btw, writing a UCI engine in BASH script language that actually plays according to the rules is a real tour de force! Well done!

Hello Justin, it seems you really deserve to be number one of the LCCRL list

Code: Select all

ShouldntExist v0.2
Copyright 2010 Justin Blanchard <UncombedCoconut at gmail>
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
You are free to change and redistribute it.
(If you do something that foolish please drop me a line though!)
ShouldntExistv0.2.sh: syntax error near unexpected token `(('
ShouldntExistv0.2.sh: ShouldntExistv0.2.sh: line 335: `  for (( FROM_POS = 0; FR
OM_POS < 78; FROM_POS++)); do'


I am using win-bash as an interpreter.

Olivier

We are making progress

Code: Select all

ShouldntExist v0.2
Copyright 2010 Justin Blanchard <UncombedCoconut at gmail>
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
You are free to change and redistribute it.
(If you do something that foolish please drop me a line though!)
ShouldntExistv0.2.sh: parse error near `(( FROM_POS = 0' [335]
ShouldntExistv0.2.sh: unrecognized modifier [336]
ShouldntExistv0.2.sh: parse error near `done' [374]
ShouldntExistv0.2.sh: parse error near `}' [377]
uci
id name ShouldntExist 0.2
id author Justin Blanchard
option name Root Depth type spin default 2 min 2 max 3
uciok


Using WinZsh now.

Olivier

Hello Olivier,
You are indeed having a lousier experience than I intended.
I think your best option is to try Cygwin's version of bash. (I haven't tested under Windows, but I bet that will work.)
win-bash says it's based on an ancient version of bash (1.14.2; latest version is 4.2). So it won't understand the shell features my program needs.
zsh is a great shell, but it uses a different syntax than bash. I wouldn't expect it to understand my script either.

The only other pitfall I know about is that Pastebin changed the line termination to DOS/Windows style ("\r\n"). Anyone who tries it under Linux should undo this change using fromdos or dos2unix, and set the script as executable.

Good luck, and I'm sorry in advance if you're disappointed with how the script rewards your persistence.

Hi Justin

Julien told me on the chat to try Cygwin and it works, at least in console mode.

I still need to find a trick to have it working under Winboard + polyglot.

And don't worry, I love having trouble with engines

Olivier

That's great!
You might try creating a file with the name LaunchShouldntExist.bat and contents like:

Code: Select all

start c:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe -l C:\path\to\ShouldntExist

Once the path/file names are corrected, open a Windows command prompt (in the same folder) and see whether the command LaunchShouldntExist starts the engine. If so, you should be able to treat LaunchShouldntExist just like any other UCI program.
If you have any serious difficulties, I can borrow a friend's Windows XP machine to figure out more exact details.

All this makes me think a program should lose Lars points if it can run natively on several operating systems.

Justin Blanchard wrote:All this makes me think a program should lose Lars points if it can run natively on several operating systems.

Nope, because it would mean that it's a script file, and Lars is really infuriated by anything that is not a solid windows exe (hence the special point against Java engines, for instance ). You don't know Lars! ^^

As for me, I'm impressed by this performance, again! The only problem is that when I played it, (at depth 3, which requires some patience...) ShoulndtExist (SE) just didn't care that its king was in check and went to check mine. So I captured its King and, without seeming to miss it the less, it just took mine in return... is that normal? If so, ES won't be able to enter Olivier's ChessWar tournament, which would be too bad, considering how excited we are to have such an original work.

BTW, I run it on a Mac, and the default bash that comes with Snow Leopard just wouldn't run the script without complaining here and then for errors. I had to update it using a non-Apple port of the bash and now it works like a charm, both when used from inside the terminal and inside interfaces (like Sigma Chess, though another interface, in Java, Jose, reported an error when SE tried to play its move).

Here is the game (its SE v0.2) :

Code: Select all

 Julien - SouldntExist v02 :
1.e4,Nf6; 2.e5,Ne4; 3.d4,Nc6; 4.f3,Nxd4; 5.Qxd4,Nd6; 6.exd6,exd6; 7.Bc4,Rg8; 8.Nh3,Qe7+;
9.Be3,c5; 10.Qf4,a5; 11.Nc3,b6; 12.O-O-O,d5; 13.Nxd5,Qe6; 14.Nc7+,Qxe3+???; 15.Nxe8,Qxc1;
And there I stopped the game.


Do you thing you could correct this behavior?

I just wrote a simple tutorial to run ShouldntExist on MacOSX and Windows. You can read it on CC, at this address.

You're right. In order to simplify the program I tried to avoid teaching it about check; instead I made the king the most valuable piece. This of course means it's willing to accept a king trade, if it can see far enough ahead. I'll release a fixed version when I'm sure it works. Thanks!

Added two new entries to the glorious LCCRL: Cheng, by Martin Sedlák and iCE, by Thomas Petzke. Welcome, Martin & Thomas!
Justin, just because you top our charts doesn't mean you must not deliver the promised debugged version! ^^

JuLieN wrote:Added two new entries to the glorious LCCRL: Cheng, by Martin Sedlák and iCE, by Thomas Petzke. Welcome, Martin & Thomas!

Those in the first post?

Jodiazio wrote:

JuLieN wrote:Added two new entries to the glorious LCCRL: Cheng, by Martin Sedlák and iCE, by Thomas Petzke. Welcome, Martin & Thomas!

Those in the first post?

Yep, the list is updated as soon as someone tests his engine.

Shouldn'tExist v0.1's reign is over...

LUCI v3 scored 2458 Lars Points!

Lol.

Matthew:out

Amazing achievement, Matthew! Your engine is the first one to officially reach the grade of International Master of Lousiness (IML), congrats!

@Justin: sorry for the loss of your title, you'll have to try less hard.

We have a new winner: Moron 1.0, by fernando Villegas! Congrats, Fern!