Komodo 8: The New World Chess Champion
The Komodo 8 program won the seventh annual World Chess Championship Thoresen Chess Engines Competition (TCEC). Thus, a new god appeared on the chess Olympus. According to the Elo coefficient generally accepted for people, the Komodo 8 program has a rating of 3265 , about 400 points more than any protein player. Komodo 8 managed to take away the crown from the former champion Stockfish 5.
The power of computer chess programs is growing every year. Moore's law also has a favorable effect: doubling the computing power of a computer adds about 30 points to Elo's rating (a decade ago the increase was 50 points). Since the victory over Kasparov 18 years ago, artificial intelligence has "wised up" somewhere in the 450 points of the rating.
The Komodo project started in 2007 as a result of the collaboration of programmer Don Dailey and grandmaster Larry Kaufman. Initially, the program was called Doch (Don's Chess), but then it turned out that this name was unfriendly in German, so it was renamed according to the name of the dragon-lizard Komodo.
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Illustration from the official website of Komodo
The first commercial release was the Komodo 4 version. Unfortunately, the author of the program Don Daily died in 2013, but his project continued to exist, and Mark Lefler, the author of the chess program Now took over the development.
A distinctive feature of Komodo is the priority use of position estimation, rather than the depth of calculating moves, like other programs. Grandmaster Kaufman, who is very good at this, helped develop position evaluation algorithms. Well, and because of this principle, Komodo provides a more interesting game. Since the program has now become a world champion, this approach can be considered very effective.
Komodo is a chess engine that has no interface, it needs a third-party GUI to work. On the official website there are several options.
The commercial version of Komodo 8 for Windows sells for $ 59.96. The Android version costs $ 4.37.
The TCEC tournament is organized to provide convenient live broadcasts of matches to an audience of chess fans from around the world. Each season is divided into several stages and lasts three to four months. Programs run on servers with no more than four CPUs. In addition to TCEC, there are IPON and CEGT championships, and Komodo 8 is also a champion there.
The power of computer chess programs is growing every year. Moore's law also has a favorable effect: doubling the computing power of a computer adds about 30 points to Elo's rating (a decade ago the increase was 50 points). Since the victory over Kasparov 18 years ago, artificial intelligence has "wised up" somewhere in the 450 points of the rating.
The Komodo project started in 2007 as a result of the collaboration of programmer Don Dailey and grandmaster Larry Kaufman. Initially, the program was called Doch (Don's Chess), but then it turned out that this name was unfriendly in German, so it was renamed according to the name of the dragon-lizard Komodo.
')
Illustration from the official website of Komodo
The first commercial release was the Komodo 4 version. Unfortunately, the author of the program Don Daily died in 2013, but his project continued to exist, and Mark Lefler, the author of the chess program Now took over the development.
A distinctive feature of Komodo is the priority use of position estimation, rather than the depth of calculating moves, like other programs. Grandmaster Kaufman, who is very good at this, helped develop position evaluation algorithms. Well, and because of this principle, Komodo provides a more interesting game. Since the program has now become a world champion, this approach can be considered very effective.
Komodo is a chess engine that has no interface, it needs a third-party GUI to work. On the official website there are several options.
The commercial version of Komodo 8 for Windows sells for $ 59.96. The Android version costs $ 4.37.
The TCEC tournament is organized to provide convenient live broadcasts of matches to an audience of chess fans from around the world. Each season is divided into several stages and lasts three to four months. Programs run on servers with no more than four CPUs. In addition to TCEC, there are IPON and CEGT championships, and Komodo 8 is also a champion there.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/375355/
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