Mychess vs. Psion 1.01

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TracySMiller
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Mychess vs. Psion 1.01

Post by TracySMiller »

In addition to running my Dedicated Computer Chess Tournament, I thought I'd play around with some of these old programs. I've been fascinated with artificial AI chess since I got a Radio Shack 1650 Fast Response as a gift when I was in college in the 80's. When I got my first computer in 1995, a Packard Bell computer running Windows 95, the first program I bought was Chessmaster 4000. I then discovered all the wonderful software out there, like Arasan, Chenard, Gnuchess, Ziggurat (which came free with Windows 95), and Rebel Decade.

I decided to test some of the older programs against each other, not a formal tournament (at least, not yet), but just gauging relative strength. I have D-Fend, and I decided to start with some of the oldest I could find, so I'm matching up Mychess, which was written in 1979 but "ported" to DOS in 1984, against Psion 1.01, from 1983. I used the Rebel 10 Bench Test (Rebel Decade 3.0 has the same test), suggested by spacious_minds to equivilate my two laptops. My fastest one gave me a Bench of 2551, and my slower one a Bench of 2440, so I throttled the faster one down to 80,000 CPU cycles to get it down to 2440.

The first game was won pretty handily by Psion 1.01, but I had lots of problems finding a decent time control. First of all, both programs by default use permanent brain, so that was not an issue. The issue was the limited time controls used by Mychess. You have a choice of either using the Levels 1-9, which refer to ply search depth, or you can specify a tournament time control of your choice by choosing the number of moves in a certain number of minutes (you choose a primary and secondary control). I decided to use the Levels 1-9 since I read in Mychess's manual that if you choose tournament controls, the programs uses 4 ply, but drops to 3 ply if it's in time trouble. On my laptop, Level 4 only takes a second or two. I don't want to play THAT fast of a game.

So that's why I decided on using the Levels (ply search depth). Level 5 was taking about 30 seconds/move, at least in the early portion of the game, so I decided on that. I set Psion 1.01 to a level where it matches the opponent's time.

It turns out that Level 5 was really erratic with the time taken. Sometimes it would move in 10 seconds, sometimes it would be well over 10 minutes. This made for a much longer game than I wanted to play.

Anyone with experience with these programs have a suggestion for matching these two against one another? Thanks in advance. I'd like to be able to get the game done within an hour, give or take 15-20 minutes.
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BenRedic
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Re: Mychess vs. Psion 1.01

Post by BenRedic »

TracySMiller wrote:In addition to running my Dedicated Computer Chess Tournament, I thought I'd play around with some of these old programs. I've been fascinated with artificial AI chess since I got a Radio Shack 1650 Fast Response as a gift when I was in college in the 80's. When I got my first computer in 1995, a Packard Bell computer running Windows 95, the first program I bought was Chessmaster 4000. I then discovered all the wonderful software out there, like Arasan, Chenard, Gnuchess, Ziggurat (which came free with Windows 95), and Rebel Decade.

I decided to test some of the older programs against each other, not a formal tournament (at least, not yet), but just gauging relative strength. I have D-Fend, and I decided to start with some of the oldest I could find, so I'm matching up Mychess, which was written in 1979 but "ported" to DOS in 1984, against Psion 1.01, from 1983. I used the Rebel 10 Bench Test (Rebel Decade 3.0 has the same test), suggested by spacious_minds to equivilate my two laptops. My fastest one gave me a Bench of 2551, and my slower one a Bench of 2440, so I throttled the faster one down to 80,000 CPU cycles to get it down to 2440.

The first game was won pretty handily by Psion 1.01, but I had lots of problems finding a decent time control. First of all, both programs by default use permanent brain, so that was not an issue. The issue was the limited time controls used by Mychess. You have a choice of either using the Levels 1-9, which refer to ply search depth, or you can specify a tournament time control of your choice by choosing the number of moves in a certain number of minutes (you choose a primary and secondary control). I decided to use the Levels 1-9 since I read in Mychess's manual that if you choose tournament controls, the programs uses 4 ply, but drops to 3 ply if it's in time trouble. On my laptop, Level 4 only takes a second or two. I don't want to play THAT fast of a game.

So that's why I decided on using the Levels (ply search depth). Level 5 was taking about 30 seconds/move, at least in the early portion of the game, so I decided on that. I set Psion 1.01 to a level where it matches the opponent's time.

It turns out that Level 5 was really erratic with the time taken. Sometimes it would move in 10 seconds, sometimes it would be well over 10 minutes. This made for a much longer game than I wanted to play.

Anyone with experience with these programs have a suggestion for matching these two against one another? Thanks in advance. I'd like to be able to get the game done within an hour, give or take 15-20 minutes.
I have not used time controls much in MyChess myself, I mostly stuck with level 4. Basically, if level 5 is too slow for you, I would go for level 4.

The manual states that searches are extended in the endgame. I would also assume that searches are extended in tactical positions, although I have not seen this mentioned in this specific manual.
Thank you for an interesting game.
TracySMiller
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Posts: 865
Joined: Sun Mar 13, 2016 2:24 am
Location: Kingsport, TN

Post by TracySMiller »

Thanks for the help. I finally got them matched up using Level 5 on both Mychess and Psion 1.01. Mychess would occasionally take 10 minutes for a move, but fortunately, that only happened four or five times/game. Usually, it would move in the 30-60 second range. I'm actually going to start playing many of these old programs against one another to see which ones are the strongest. I'll start a separate thread for that.
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