English Chess Forum

I have been feeling a little masochistic lately and tried playing some games against computers.
As most people probably are aware, most programmes are unbeatable by humans now and even at a "reduced" playing level they still proceed to spatter any plan you attempt until making an occasional huge blunder to even the odds.

An interesting thing I have noted in these games is the computers reluctance to let itself get mated (resignation is, of course, out of the question) and instead will drag the obvious moves out for ages in the manner of a petulant child.

Has anyone else noticed this? Could it be a glimpse of the ai starting to awaken and become more self aware?

You've simply anthropomorphised the AI's behaviour. It isn't petulant. It isn't intelligent. It's just completing serial processing as ordered.

There is no need whatsoever for it to be spending 30-40 seconds per move when it only has a choice of two or three which all lead to an inevitable checkmate. When it is has earlier been analysing incredibly complex middlegame positions and coming up with decent moves in a mere few seconds it seems inconceivable that those end positions are taking any more then a few microseconds to analyse right to the concision of the game.

Its just being very practical In general it'll be programmed to truncate its search at some sane point to keep time in hand.

Just so long as it can find anything playable that is. If it can't do that then it'll keep looking at everything possible..... Takes a very long time for a computer to get bored of doing that!

Sometimes they don't even start up, it's as if they don't feel like playing some days.

If you want a competitive game, simply download one of the free engines that are significantly weaker and nearer your ELO (has the advantage that they don't play like Kasparov for 99% of the time with the odd blunder thrown in)

List of engines here: http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/

Here's one of the weaker ones: http://predateur-chess.blogspot.co.uk/

Not tried this one but it is weaker still I think. 1600 elo ish?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cassand ... cassandre/

My copy of Fritz 12 has been misbehaving for some time. When I ask it to save a game I have just entered as a .pgn file it demurs and saves it as as about 10 assorted chessbase files instead. Does anyone know how I can persuade my German friend to do what I want?

Create a new pgn database. Then copy the game from the chessbase database into the pgn database

Joey Stewart wrote:An interesting thing I have noted in these games is the computers reluctance to let itself get mated (resignation is, of course, out of the question) and instead will drag the obvious moves out for ages in the manner of a petulant child.

Has anyone else noticed this? Could it be a glimpse of the ai starting to awaken and become more self aware?

It's easy enough to add some lines of code to slow down the tempo of play when the engine is facing inevitable mate. That is, it's not the AI awakening but rather the malice and petulance of the coder who wrote the engine software.