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Houdini wins hands down!

Posted: Sat Aug 26, 2017 10:12 am
by johnkramer
I've been toying with engine matches past week or 2, Houdini 5.01 clobbers both stockfish 8 and Komodo 11.2 on my PC, i7 980x engines all use 12 threads.

They can barely win a single game, so stockfish being #1 is fishy. Maybe special settings i dunno, just using defaults here + 12 threads.

Anyone have explanation?

Re: Houdini wins hands down!

Posted: Sat Aug 26, 2017 7:47 pm
by johnkramer
PS I've been using Fixed depth 16/Ply, not sure what the standard is.

Re: Houdini wins hands down!

Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2017 12:47 pm
by H.G.Muller
Fixed-depth is worse than pointless. It favors the engine that prunes least, i.e. that wastes most time on searching poor lines. Even TSCP would beat Houdini at 16 ply. (It would take a few months per move to reach 16 ply, of course.)

Standard is fixed time per game or session, where engines that won't waste time on poor lines, but use that time to reach higher depth on the promising lines instead, are strongest.

Re: Houdini wins hands down!

Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2017 4:02 am
by johnkramer
ah ok thanks, looks like that's accurate, 7 draws so far on 10 min Long game 40 moves so now the chess engine world makes more sense :)