Chess@Home

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Alez
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#1 Chess@Home

Post by Alez »

http://chess.qugate.org/

This project was running quite well but it seems that the work was finished very quickly. There may be more work available in the future.
Credits are not listed on boincstats or UBT stats service. Time spent does count towards WUProp stats and stars.

About Chess@Home

BOINC volunteers have already evaluated 30301792 positions. Many thanks to you all!
The purpose of this project is to construct a chess winnig possition classifier (or score estimator) based on some simple features (e.g. the number of pieces of each kind, number of squares controled by given side, numbers of checks that you can give in a possition and so on) The first goal of the project is to establish how far we can get with relatively cheap methods of position evaluation and simple data mining methods (eg. logistic regression, k-nearest neighbors, SVM, decision trees). The second goal is to use more advance machine learning techniques for recognition of winning position to emulate human behaviour of various levels of chess proficiency. This means we need good heuristic which will allow to narrow the range of positions to calculate in depth. There is a hope that modifying this heuristic from “more learnt” to “less learnt” we will obtain something similar to natural human levels.

To achieve this goals, in a first phase, I am going to build a vast database of chess positions (I collected already 25 mln and growing) and evaluate them with chess engine - my choice is open source Stockfish. For each position I will keep the score (in centipawns or moves to mate if discovered) and the best move. I assumed that for the purposes of this project it will be enough to calculate 5 000 000 nodes per position which requires an average 5 - 6 secs per position for one core (~2.5 GHz). To evaluate 25 mln possition on one core I would need 6 x 25 mln = 150 mln sec, which means 41 666 hours, 1736 full days. And 25 mln is only the number of possitions in games of known chess masters (that I have), which means games on a good level. I also plan to add more games from less advanced players from FISC game database to have also relatively weaker positions. So the overall number of positions can reach easily hundreds of millions. It is impossible to build desired database within single computer, so the only chance for me to complete my project is to use generosity of BOINC community. Later, after first phase of data collecting, BOINC will be still used for some part of machine learning phase.

With the help of Poland BOINC foundation, special thanks for Krzysztof Piszczek - who is my mentor in the BOINC world, I managed to set up BOINC server and begin Chess@Home project. I am quite newb in BOINC community so I welcome all comments concerning this project - please write all questions and suggestions on forum.

The main application of the project at client side is chessathome (e.g. in Windows: chessathome_1_windows_intelx86.exe), but it's only a provider that runs stockfish.exe which is chess engine from www.stockfishchess.org. The process stockfish.exe uses CPU extensively as it is totally responsible for possition evaluation. I set 9 credits per task (~10 min on 2.5 GHz core).

Project is maintained by Michal Stanislaw Wojcik
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The best form of help from above is a sniper on the rooftop....
User avatar
Alez
[ TSBT's Pirate ]
[ TSBT's Pirate ]
Posts: 10363
Joined: Thu Oct 04, 2012 1:22 pm
Location: roaming the planet

#2 Re: Chess@Home

Post by Alez »

Server is now unreachable. Project probably finished.
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The best form of help from above is a sniper on the rooftop....
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