Hiarcs World Computer Software Champion 2013!

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ricard60
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Post by ricard60 »

Congrats to the Hiarcs team. What hardware used Hiarcs on this one?
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Harvey Williamson
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Post by Harvey Williamson »

ricard60 wrote:Congrats to the Hiarcs team. What hardware used Hiarcs on this one?
In the WCSC all used an identical laptop with 8 cores.
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Harvey Williamson
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Post by Harvey Williamson »

In R9 of the WCSC Hiarcs lost to pandix. The game was clearly winning for Pandix. Hiarcs near the end promoted a pawn to a Bishop!? The Winboard gui that Pandix was playing in automatically promotes to a Queen when the move is entered by the mouse. It was decided, rightly, that Pandix was not at fault here it was the gui that got it wrong. So the game resumed with the position correctly adjusted to make the Queen a Bishop. If the Pandix engine had been at fault here he would have forfeit the game.

[fen]4B3/3b4/5k2/1pP5/1P5p/3p4/3N3K/8 b - - 0 90[/fen]
This was the position after 90. e8=B
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Mark Uniacke
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Post by Mark Uniacke »

A huge thank you must go to Harvey for all he work he put into the World Championship in Japan, giving up his holiday time to commit to a week of intensive work is not easy. The victory could not of been achieved without him.

The playing schedule was arduous to say the least with 3 tournament games per day and significant travelling time to and from the venue (as the venue was changed at the last minute after hotels were booked). In addition I provided book prep each day which meant Harvey was left with plenty to do even when he was not playing, often with me contacting him at 6am local time to discuss the days prep and also late night discussions. I also practically gave up sleep during the event so it was exhausting all round.

Harvey applied all the overlay books and other settings we used and handled everything perfectly, it was very reassuring to know it was in such good hands.

However all this work meant I am sure Harvey hardly even knew he was in Japan and certainly did not get to see much of it. I am sure the EU working time directive was well and truely breached, luckily the event was in Japan, those cuning ICGA guys know how to work everyone! :wink:

Thanks to the HIARCS team for all the testing pre the event where we went though about 100 versions. Eric, Christian and Harvey were testing almost 24x7 at some points.

Thanks also to Michal who produced a tournament version of HIARCS Chess Explorer so it could be used in the World Championship, I am sure many of these new features will find their way into the commercial release.

It was especially nice to have our GUI, engine and books all coming together like this.

That is not to say we did not have issues during the event, HIARCS is in the middle of development and as might be expected we found a number of engine issues which caused us difficulties. We also learnt a lot from the experience and that can only help us.

A tough fought World Championship which made it all the more rewarding to achieve success. So after all that it is very satisfying to retain the World Chess Software Champion title. :D
Best wishes,
Mark

https://www.hiarcs.com
h.g.muller
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Post by h.g.muller »

Harvey Williamson wrote:The Winboard gui that Pandix was playing in automatically promotes to a Queen when the move is entered by the mouse. It was decided, rightly, that Pandix was not at fault here it was the gui that got it wrong.
It is always hard to judge what was going on if I don't know the exact settings that were used, but this could very well have been an operator error.

WinBoard does have a mode "Always Promote to Queen", which can be checked in the General Options menu dialog, and would indeed result in the behavior you describe.

Image

WinBoard comes configured to use 'detour underpromotion' when the 'always Queen' option is off. In this mode the 7th-rank Pawn morphs into a Queen as soon as you grab it, while the message 'Pull Pawn backwards to underpromote' appears above the board. You then have to drag the Pawn backwards until it morphs into the piece you want (cycling through Q -> N -> B -> R -> Q...), and then drag it forwards to the promotion square. You can configure it for a promotion popup to appear with buttons for Q, R, B and N by running it (once) with the additional option '-sweepPromotions false'.
joejohnston3
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Post by joejohnston3 »

Hiarcs and Junior did a wonderful job at Yokohama 2013!!

I was curious about something though; I noticed Houdini was not present and some other engines that rank quite high on the independent rankings. Do these engines not qualify for the WCCC or WCSC? I am wondering how they would do in a tournament like this since most testing show them dominating in chess. I am just curious and not trying to take anything away from Hiarcs or Junior.
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Harvey Williamson
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Post by Harvey Williamson »

joejohnston3 wrote:Hiarcs and Junior did a wonderful job at Yokohama 2013!!

I was curious about something though; I noticed Houdini was not present and some other engines that rank quite high on the independent rankings. Do these engines not qualify for the WCCC or WCSC? I am wondering how they would do in a tournament like this since most testing show them dominating in chess. I am just curious and not trying to take anything away from Hiarcs or Junior.
As far as I know no other author tried to enter. It is an expensive business entering these events. The Houdini author has stated publically he is not interested in entering.
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Post by joejohnston3 »

Thank you for the clarification and that surely makes sense.
IvenGO
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Post by IvenGO »

That's just because Houdini is a cloned software and could be disqualified as well as Rybka was.
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Harvey Williamson
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Post by Harvey Williamson »

If you want to play through all the games take a look here http://www.hiarcs.com/Games/wcsc13/wcsc2013.htm
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