New Chess Engine: Gray Matter

[Rajiv Bakulesh Shah]

Greetings, fellow chess engine enthusiasts!

My name is Raj and I'm the primary author of Gray Matter. I started this project to teach myself (and hopefully others) about chess engine programming. I've been documenting my progress on my wiki and blog. I'm in need of some advice.

1. How strong is Gray Matter? I'd appreciate it if someone would estimate its rating.

2. What could make Gray Matter stronger? Currently, Gray Matter uses fail-soft alpha-beta with MTD(f), rotated bitboards, and a simple transposition table. I believe null-move pruning, quiescence search, and a more sophisticated transposition table (which stores both upper and lower bounds) would yield the most dramatic improvements in strength. I'd appreciate it if someone would give me feedback on my analysis.

I host my code on Google and I liberally grant commit privileges - not only to programmers but also to people who may wish to twiddle the wiki. Thanks for allowing me this opportunity to participate in a vibrant community.

[H.G.Muller]

I couldn't find any download of your engine at Google. Just a PGN file of a game played against itself.

Am I missing something?

[Tord Romstad]

I couldn't find any download of your engine at Google. Just a PGN file of a game played against itself.

Am I missing something?

Hello Harm Geert,

I also could't find a binary download, but you can get the source code from the Subversion repository. If you have Subversion installed, just type:

Code: Select all

svn checkout http://gray-matter.googlecode.com/svn/

at the command line, and the complete source code will be downloaded.

The code compiled cleanly without any changes on my machine.

Tord

[Rajiv Bakulesh Shah]

Hi, Harm!

Tord is correct. Gray Matter is currently only available as source code. You must compile it. If you can't compile it or run Windows, please let me know, and I'll provide an executable.

If you run a Unix-like operating system and have the GNU developer tools and Subversion, download and compile Gray Matter by issuing these commands:

Code: Select all

svn checkout http://gray-matter.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ gray-matter/
cd gray-matter/
gmake clean
gmake

The Gray Matter executable is bin/gray. It uses a 64 MB transposition table. You can change this (and other things) by editing inc/config.h then issuing the commands: gmake clean; gmake

Thanks for your interest in Gray Matter!

[H.G.Muller]

I see. As I don't have Subversion or C++ installed, I think I'll pass on this one then...

[Pablo]

Hi, Harm!

Tord is correct. Gray Matter is currently only available as source code. You must compile it. If you can't compile it or run Windows, please let me know, and I'll provide an executable.

If you run a Unix-like operating system and have the GNU developer tools and Subversion, download and compile Gray Matter by issuing these commands:

Code: Select all

svn checkout http://gray-matter.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ gray-matter/
cd gray-matter/
gmake clean
gmake

The Gray Matter executable is bin/gray. It uses a 64 MB transposition table. You can change this (and other things) by editing inc/config.h then issuing the commands: gmake clean; gmake

Thanks for your interest in Gray Matter!

Hi Rajiv:
If possible please send me an executable of Gray Matter with no more of 32 MB of transposition table.
Many,many thanks in advance.
My email is pablourz@gmail.com
Regards,
Pablo Urzua

[Rajiv Bakulesh Shah]

Hi, Pablo.

No problem, please give me a couple of days. I'll compile an executable for you with a 32 MB transposition table by default. I'll also make a command-line parameter to modify the size of the transposition table at runtime. Are you running Windows? If so, which version?

Thanks,
Raj

Hi Rajiv:
If possible please send me an executable of Gray Matter with no more of 32 MB of transposition table.
Many,many thanks in advance.
My email is pablourz@gmail.com
Regards,
Pablo Urzua

[Pablo]

Hi Rajiv:
Many thanks for your offer. My OS is Windows 2000.
I look foward for your engine.
By the way I have a winboard engine called GrayRev6.exe of year 2006. Is this engine related with yours? .
Best regards,
Pablo

[Rajiv Bakulesh Shah]

Hi, Pablo.

Yes, I believe that's Dann Corbit's compile of revision 6 of my engine. Since then, I've come a long way! I'm currently on revision 946!

Regards,
Raj

Hi Rajiv:
Many thanks for your offer. My OS is Windows 2000.
I look foward for your engine.
By the way I have a winboard engine called GrayRev6.exe of year 2006. Is this engine related with yours? .
Best regards,
Pablo

[Olivier Deville]

Hi Raj

Please send me when ready a windows compile of Gray Matter with 128 mb hash.

Gray Matter will participate in my promo tournament that starts on July 23rd (please check my website for details). Rev 6 pleayed the last edition.

Olivier

[Pablo]

Hi, Pablo.

No problem, please give me a couple of days. I'll compile an executable for you with a 32 MB transposition table by default. I'll also make a command-line parameter to modify the size of the transposition table at runtime. Are you running Windows? If so, which version?

Thanks,
Raj

Hi Rajiv:
If possible please send me an executable of Gray Matter with no more of 32 MB of transposition table.
Many,many thanks in advance.
My email is pablourz@gmail.com
Regards,
Pablo Urzua

Hi Raj:
Any problem with my request ?
I still do not receive your Gray Matter executable.
Kind regards,
Pablo

[Olivier Deville]

Hi Raj

Same here, nothing in my mailbox so far... Revision 6 will start the tournament, but I'll update Gray Matter as soon as I get a new working version. Thanks

Olivier

[Jim Ablett]

Hi All,

Using Andrew Fan's fix prevent's windows' builds of Gray Matter from
crashing, but the engine fails to make any moves in any time controls
in both Winboard and Arena - this also affects the Cygwin builds.

in 'Search.cpp', it looks like 'timeout_flag' and 'depth_flag' just aren't working, so the search isn't terminating.

Code: Select all

   for (depth = 1; depth <= max_depth; depth++)
   {
      guess[depth & 1] = mtdf(depth, guess[depth & 1].value);
      if (timeout_flag &&  depth_flag || IS_NULL_MOVE(guess[depth & 1]))
         /*
          | Oops.  Either the alarm has interrupted this
          | iteration (and the results are incomplete and
          | unreliable), or there's no legal move in this
          | position (and the game must've ended).
          */
         break;


I've hacked the source so Gray Matter can run with a fixed depth, so
at least you can try it out until it's fixed properly. The download contains
a handful of different builds with different fixed depths to match your
favourite time control.

Gray Matter revision 953 Windows exe:

http://www.mydatabus.com/public/deckard/gray_matter_rev953.zip

Jim.