SuperSteve3D

Engine

Three engine releases are planned in 2009:

• Rybka 3+ – Rybka 3 playing strength, with bugfixes and cosmetic improvements, for Rybka 3 customers
• Pocket Rybka 3 – published by Convekta/ChessOK, packaged with their Pocket Champion interface, conforms to S. Tsukrov’s Pocket-UCI protocol
• Rybka 4 – better search, better eval, new analysis features

There are no official dates yet. The first two are reasonably close while the third will be in the summer or fall. Other ports (ie. Symbian, or other Pocket PC protocols) are still possible, but nothing concrete is planned yet.

Opening Book

Jeroen has one very innovative product in the pipeline. Things are moving extremely fast right now in this area as we continue to make the shift to general chess study tools. Details will be available shortly.

Tournaments

We’re going to shift our focus a bit. Our tournament goal for 2009 is to win a top freestyle event in 100% automated mode. This involves:

• Continuing work on our cluster, a vital research topic for the near future. The general plan is to augment Lukas’ core hardware with external machines.
• Putting on a great show, with an unprecedented level of chess.
• Showing off unreleased Rybka features and contrasting those with the public Rybka features which are available to our opponents.
• Tapping into the natural interest in man vs machine, which here is man + machine vs machine.

Currently, our sights are set on the InfinityChess ‘Grand Prix 2009’ tournaments – we’ll play openly and transparently there. We would also be interested in other freestyle tournaments and would highly welcome an innovative organizer who can take advantage of this opportunity. For example, I would love to see a round-robin freestyle tournament consisting of past winners of freestyle tournaments, top correspondence players, top over-the-board players (all playing in centaur mode of course), along with our cluster in automated mode. This would be a fantastic show, and would help settle (or maybe reignite) some long-standing debates as well.

 

In a historic achievement, the MoGo computer program
defeated Myungwan Kim 8P Thursday by 1.5 points in a 9-stone game. “It
played really well,” said Kim, who estimated MoGo’s current strength at
“two or maybe three dan,” though he noted that the program – which used
800 processors, at 4.7 Ghz, 15 Teraflops on borrowed supercomputers –
“made some 5-dan moves,” like those in the lower right-hand corner,
where Moyogo took advantage of a mistake by Kim to get an early lead.
“I can’t tell you how amazing this is,” David Doshay—the SlugGo
programmer who suggested the match—told the E-Journal after the
game. “I’m shocked at the result. I really didn’t expect the computer
to win in a one-hour game.” Kim easily won two blitz games with 9
stones and 11 stones and minutes and lost one with 12 stones and 15
minutes by 3.5 points. The games were played live at the U.S. Go
Congress, with over 500 watching online on KGS. “I think there’s no
chance on nine stones,” Kim told the EJ after the game. “It would even
be difficult with eight stones. MoGo played really well; after getting
a lead, every time I played aggressively, it just played safely, even
when it meant sacrificing some stones. It didn’t try to maximize the
win and just played the most sure way to win. It’s like a machine.” The
game generated a lot of interest and discussion about the game’s
tactics and philosophical implications. “Congratulations on making
history today,” game organizer Peter Drake told both Kim and Olivier
Teytaud, one of MoGo’s programmers, who participated in a brief online
chat after the game. At a rare loss for words in a brief interview with
the EJ after the game, Doshay wondered “How much time do we have left?
We’ve improved nine stones in just a year and I suspect the next nine
will fall quickly now.

 

There will be another high-profile Man vs. Machine match, this time between Kim MyungWan, a young Korean 8 dan professional, and MoGo, the French Monte-Carlo program. MoGo will be playing remotely from a 3000-processor cluster in Amsterdam.

The game will be played on 19×19. First a few quick games will be played to establish an appropriate handicap, then there will be one “serious” match. This market concerns the latter.

The event will be on Thursday, August 7, at 1:00 PM Pacific time, in the Computer Go room at KGS (www.gokgs.com)

 

It’s time now to talk about the many evaluation improvements in Rybka 3 over Rybka 2.3.2a. There are so many that I can only list the more important ones. A lot of the improvement consists of assigning better values to previously existing terms; I won’t go into that. Here is a list of what’s new, in five categories:

A) General terms
1. Better definition of mobility
2. New concept of “range”
3. New “contempt” – now when set Rybka tries to avoid various drawish factors, such as neutral trades, blocked pawn structures, and symmetrical pawn structures.
4. New definition of game phase
5. Revised basic piece values
6. Scoring tactical threats in the evaluation (previously handled only by search)
7. New table of how the value of minor pieces depends on which other ones are on the board
8. Safe squares for pieces
9. Relative placement of certain pieces and pawns

B) Opening Play
1. Try to avoid separating neighbor pawns (as in pawns on c2 and d4, knight on c3).
2. Value the right to castle.
3. Connect your rooks.

C) Endgame Play
1. Some rook endgame heuristics
2. Advanced passers are the key to queen endgames.
3. More knowledge about which endgames are drawish and which are not
4. New terms regarding good rook placement

D) Middlegame Play
1. Understanding good and bad bishops
2. Much more advanced understanding of king attacks
3. Importance of defending the king by pieces
4. “Space” (previously addressed only indirectly)

E) Pawn Structure
1. New definitions regarding unopposed pawns
2. Classification of types of backward pawns
3. Pawn Islands
4. Extra penalty for doubled isolated pawns
5. terms relating to how pawns are placed relative to neighboring pawns

 

Rybka 3 book info

Credits – Vas and Larry: for the brilliant Rybka 3 engine that found so many novelties, nice ideas and refutations. – Dagh Nielsen: for the very inspiring preparation sessions and all the great stuff you found in the Najdorf. – IM Merijn van Delft: for the breath taking Petroff novelty I was allowed to use. – IM Iweta Rajlich: for providing me with some nice analysis and exciting opening material. – My Q6600: no good book without good hardware – Playchess engine room: without all you guys this book would never exist! – ChessBase: for selling my book and giving me this opportunity.

What can you expect – The Rybka 3 book is a combination of the best GM games and computer games of the past few years. – I worked on it for 6.5 months, on average I put around 4 times more hours and effort in this new book when compared with RybkaII. – It contains a lot of novelties, original analysis and new ideas. – It is thoroughly computer checked. – Improvements were made on a daily basis, with the help of 8000 test games being played and analysed. – The book has been tested against a wide variety of other books. – You will find improvements on Playchess theory in it, as well as refutations of some popular Playchess lines. – Although I have a private book, I have made no concessions with the Rybka 3 book, i.e. all the good stuff I found during testing and analysing is in the book.

Availability – The Rybka 3 book is in ctg-format and will be exclusively available through ChessBase.

Why stand alone – With the Rybka 3 book I want to reach a very broad chess audience:

A) Hobby players
B) Club players
C) Correspondence players
D) Tournament players
E) International masters and grandmasters
F) Chess enthousiasts who like to play engine-engine matches
G) ChessBase 8/9/10 users
H) ChessBase engine users who don’t want to have Rybka, but are interested in updating their books
I) Aquarium users
J) All other people interested in the latest opening theory

– Once it was clear to me that this was my goal and greatest wish, I verified the possible options. – As the book was in ctg-format, the agreement with ChessBase was by far the most logical step for me. – A stand alone product will put more emphasis on the book and its pro’s, this would not have been the case when incorporated in the Rybka 3 package. – Only with a stand alone product I can reach the audience mentioned above. – For me earning a little extra is nice, but I must confess that the PR and the exposure generated are far more thrilling for me .

Of course I fully understand that people expected Rybka3.ctg to be in the Rybka 3 package. I hope that I made clear what my considerations were and why I made the step. In any case I can tell you that I gave my very best to make Rybka3.ctg possible and that the ChessBase agreement was a huge boost to make it even better. I hope you will enjoy the new Rybka book