So my computer came with the Microsoft game “Chess Titans”.
I fire it up for the first time, set it to max difficulty, play 1 e4. The damn thing starts thinking. And thinking. After 20 seconds, I kill it.
What the hell kind of chess program thinks about its first move? It must have been torn between a Ruy Lopez and a Gioco Piano. But seriously, it must have been searching the game tree to take that long. What a piece of shit.
You are just underestimating how good you are. That pawn move was setting up the Miramon Knight Sacrifice Body Slam and the computer knew it.
Troy
I’ve been playing Chess Titans quite a bit since I’ve gotten Vista. Moves are usually instaneous, but I’ve been playing on a pretty low difficulty level. The way to be better at chess (for humans and computers), is to consider possible board positions in the future. Hence, harder difficulty levels might be more resource intensive as the computer has process exponentially more moves into the future.
Or, maybe your computer is just slow to begin with. I’d check difficulty level first, though.
Greatatlantic, it’s been SOP for the vast majority of commercial Chess programs written in recent decades to use an opening book for its first N moves, specifically because it leads to known lines of advantage or disadvantage and because the sheer number of combinations early on leads to a “horizon effect” where the best first move is not truly known. (Crucial moves during the mid-game also have the same problem.) If MS Chess Titans has an opening book, it should be moving quickly at first regardless of difficulty level.
Bruce
I’ve never tried that program, but I’d bet there’s a checkbox somewhere which disables the opening book.
Not in the options pane or anywhere else in the UI, anyhow.
I’m going to guess it doesn’t have an opening book… though it’s playing like it does, confusing. Why not go get a program like Shredder?
Here’s a helpful page: http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/. Well, helpful in seeing difficulty but not how well they scale, unfortunately. I’m told Shredder is very human-like at its lower levels, feeling less like it’s making the odd bad move to balance things out, and more that it plays like a lower level player.
I tried a difficulty 10, while compressing a file in 7-Zip on my 3Ghz Pentium 4 and it took about twenty seconds to make its opening move as black.
Maybe it has a fixed-time search to try to find a better move, before defaulting to a book move.
Bruce
I think it’s well-nigh impossible for a chess program not to have an opening book. Maybe the first attempts on analog computers had none, but since the days of core memory, I’m going to say not a single chess program has lacked one. There’s simply no point to doing without one, and even the dumbest freeware has always had them – chess openings themselves are not copyrightable, so they can just copy them from earlier programs or transcribe them from MCO or whatever they want.
So it appears to me that the programmers were simply too disinterested in playing the game and testing their own code not to disable search when on the book early in the game. On difficulty 8 out of 10, it takes 2 seconds of hourglass to respond 1 c5 (Indian defense, certainly from the book), and on setting 9 it takes 10 seconds to make the same move; but on setting 10, it’s 20 seconds, which is just absurd.
Incidentally the computer is a dual-core AMD from last year, though reading from the book should be just as fast on a 68000 machine from 1984.
As an aside, its book seems really committed to the c pawn, every game I’ve started with e4 (6 or so now, just to test it) it’s either played an Indian (c5) or more unexpectedly the Caro-Kann (c4).
You really want to play a chess program on the highest setting? Are you Kasparov in disguise? Chess Titans certainly isn’t the world’s strongest chess program but still…
I have a really fast quad core and I tested this out, it took 24 seconds.
Microsoft’s Chess game is so sophisticated is simulates the hesitation of an actual human opponent. The more processing power you have the more subtle the patented second guessing engine is!
Or it’s playing the classic ‘bored out of my skull’ gambit to goad the player into conceding, effective in this case
I used to be a pretty good player, was in the Marshall club as a little kid, though I haven’t played in years.
Yeah, I’m sure even Chess Titans would kick my ass at its best level when I make some dumb mistake, but playing against a gimped opponent seems dumb to me somehow. I only fired it up on a whim, and was surprised to see the strange delay before 1 … c5.
Never play chess with a Sicilian?
“Pretty Good Player” doesn’t cut it any more. While I can’t speak to the quality of Chess Titans, just about any other modern Chess program will wipe the floor with anyone but a IM/GM. If you’re at the IM/GM level, you can probably expect a tie, unless you are lucky enough to get the computer into one of the weaker opening lines in its book.
Bruce
Who knows what its strength is, but apparently it doesn’t even know the rules:
Castling through check, forsooth! Cheater!
Chess Titans is a concise illustration of Microsoft in general. Unfinished, more interested in prettiness than performance, and fond of making illegal moves.
The delay was a psycological attack, and it earned the computer the game through your withdrawl. It is devious indeed.
/nods knowingly
that’s what data did on that early season episode of star trek:tng to that super grandmaster strategy guy.