Winboard Forum

Hello !

I am shamelessly surfing on this wave of interest for old winboard engines to plead the case of Olithink 2.21.

This 1998 engine plays great chess and it looks like it could be on par with GnuChess 5.0 or so. Unfortunatly, it crashes way too often.

I first thought it was hash related and that without them it would be ok (I believed I was smart for around ten minutes), but there is a nasty bug concerning capturing back. For example, if a5xb4 is played and the answer should be a3xb4, Olithink 2.21 will try to play something like h5xg6 (a precedent capture ?) and lose the game due to illegal moves.

As the source code is still avalaible there :
http://cap.connx.com/chess-engines/olithink/
I am wondering if it would be possible to fix the bug.

Many thanks if someone can help or even make me look stupid by telling how to work around that.
(I have tested with arena, winboard mode or with WB2UCI, but I am quite sure it is not GUI related).

Best wishes.
YS

Oliver Brausch says :

This is great thank you. you can tell them on the board, I do have a bugfree (and winboard protocol compatible) Version of OliThink 2.2 and will put them soon on my homepage.

Olivier

That's really wonderful !

YS

First I have bad news for you: OliPow (that was OliThink's name 1997(!)) was no way as strong as GnuChess 4 or 5, but it was ok and very small, too.-

Recently I found the code for Version 2.2.e and revived it. I removed the funchess sections (Suicide, Loser and Atomic) and fixed the xboard-protocol handling, that was a complete miss in the oridingal code from 1997.
Now it's absolutely comtabible to Winboard/Xbaord/Arena. I played a tourney with Arena and it worked well and did not once such things as you described above.

You can download source and binaries for 2.2.e at:

http://home.arcor.de/dreamlike/chess/index.html

in the section "Older Versions".

Oliver Brausch wrote:[...] Recently I found the code for Version 2.2.e and revived it. I removed the funchess sections (Suicide, Loser and Atomic) and fixed the xboard-protocol handling, that was a complete miss in the oridingal code from 1997.
You can download source and binaries for 2.2.e at: [...]

Hello !

Many thanks. I'm looking forward to test it. I will of course post here the results.

Just a historical question : you say Olithink 2.2e is from 1997 but, up to my knowledge (vastly based on Guenther Simon's fantastic WB/UCI anthology and upon reading readme files), Olithink was first released in december 1998 ? Is your engine older ?

Many, many thanks to all those versions of your nice engine you have made freely available through more than 10 years.

Best wishes.
YS

Yannik Snoeckx wrote:
Hello !

Many thanks. I'm looking forward to test it. I will of course post here the results.

Just a historical question : you say Olithink 2.2e is from 1997 but, up to my knowledge (vastly based on Guenther Simon's fantastic WB/UCI anthology and upon reading readme files), Olithink was first released in december 1998 ? Is your engine older ?

Many, many thanks to all those versions of your nice engine you have made freely available through more than 10 years.

Best wishes.
YS

1997 is the correct date. The release from OliThink 2.2.e is actually from August 27th, 1997 as stated in main.c.
I double checked the date and it's confirmed. On June 1997 there where versions of OliPow 2.1.3 running on Free ICSs.

Yannik Snoeckx wrote:

Oliver Brausch wrote:[...] Recently I found the code for Version 2.2.e and revived it. I removed the funchess sections (Suicide, Loser and Atomic) and fixed the xboard-protocol handling, that was a complete miss in the oridingal code from 1997.
You can download source and binaries for 2.2.e at: [...]

Hello !

Many thanks. I'm looking forward to test it. I will of course post here the results.

Just a historical question : you say Olithink 2.2e is from 1997 but, up to my knowledge (vastly based on Guenther Simon's fantastic WB/UCI anthology and upon reading readme files), Olithink was first released in december 1998 ? Is your engine older ?

Many, many thanks to all those versions of your nice engine you have made freely available through more than 10 years.

Best wishes.
YS

Hi Yannick,

You mix up different versions. 2.21 was released at the date you said.
Obviously earlier versions were either not released or not compatible
with WB or Linux only.

Regards,
Guenther

Guenther Simon wrote:Hi Yannick,

You mix up different versions. 2.21 was released at the date you said.
Obviously earlier versions were either not released or not compatible
with WB or Linux only.

Regards,
Guenther

Hi Guenther,

Yes, you are right about 2.21. I didn't put my question clearly enough. I wanted to know if 2.2e was officially released and freely avalaible or if 2.21 was the very first official one given to the chess community.

I didn't find much in the archives of this forum or CCC. Only this in CCC (I hope it's allright to quote it) :
[Subject: OliThink 2.2.1 released
Author: Ralph Jörg Hellmig
Date: 23:12:00 12/07/98
Look at http://www.phy.uni-bayreuth.de/~btp434
OliThink now supports pondering under winboard without problem ...
Ralph]
So it could be 2.21 was not the first as Olithink is not mentionned as a new engine, but not a definitive proof ...

Best wishes.
YS

Oliver Brausch wrote: [...] Recently I found the code for Version 2.2.e and revived it. I removed the funchess sections (Suicide, Loser and Atomic) and fixed the xboard-protocol handling, that was a complete miss in the oridingal code from 1997.
Now it's absolutely comtabible to Winboard/Xbaord/Arena. I played a tourney with Arena and it worked well and did not once such things as you described above.

Hello !

Yes, it looks like it plays without crashing at all. Very nice, many thanks.
As for the strenght, I will play some games and give results in a few days or weeks.

Best wishes.
YS