Lucaschess engine ELO's

Does anyone know how the ELO of Lucas Chess engines were determined? For exemple - I'm a beginner I know - I can win against the "Gaia 1" 1000-something engine but the "Fixed 600 ELO" Rodent plays me in a corner??

Pretty sure they used the staircase method.  You know, write the name of each engine on a seperate piece of paper, stand at the top of a staircase and throw the stack of papers in the air.   Note their respective positions upon landing and there you have it: a ranking system. 

They probably just take the developer's word for the rating.  Doubt there is independent testing, but then I'm wrong a lot. 

I let rodent play versus gaia and rodent won

I have a lot of positions of fide games, with a player elo associated.

Each position has an stockfish evaluation.

Then the engine plays one by one these ordenated positions like it was a game. Each engine begin with 1200 elo, and win and lost points with each position and its answer comparing with fide player elo and his move.

Second step, using Strategic Test Suite, as it calc another elo.

And an average of both.

Fixed elo is a calc of each engine, program only says to engine to play with that elo.

Well, unless I'm doing something wrong, it seems that Rodent 1.6 elo 600 (fixed elo) in Lucas Chess plays super strong. I set up a number of games with Rodent 1.6 elo 600 on Lucas Chess vs. Rodent 1.6 elo 600 on Arena 3.0. In 5 games, the Lucas Chess Rodent engine completely shredded the Arena Rodent in all 5 games. The games weren't even close.

And I was so sad as a returning chess player of old that I couldn't even win from a 600 elo! Rats. Well, rodents.

Baddogno is right though; Even if the engines are working as designed, their elo ratings are often horribly inaccurate. The engine programmers often just take a wild guess at the ratings and don't do any calibration of the elo curves. It's simply too time consuming, so they just don't bother with it. I can't really blame them; I'd probably do the same if I were in their shoes.

Then something is wrong in my program, I´ll study it.

Please, can you explain me the way to install Rodent 1.6 with 600 elo in Arena ? I don´t know Arena, I have tried but I have not found the way to indicate that fixed elo.

Before we discuss the Arena setup, I'd like to mention one more thing I noticed about the Lucas Chess (LC) setup. I'm assuming that once I've chosen the fixed elo "Rodent 1.6 (600)" engine, the other strength settings should have no effect on Rodent's playing strength. However, I've noticed that if I set the depth to "--", Rodent plays a very strong game, but if I set the depth to "1", Rodent will play very weakly. (Ideally, if these other strength settings are not supposed to have any effect on the playing strength of the fixed elo Rodent engine, then these strength settings should be greyed out so that the user won't be trying to change them.)

Regarding the Arena setup, Rodent is installed the same as any UCI engine, but with one difference. In order to set Rodent by elo, you must edit the "rodent.ini" file by changing the "user normal" line to "user power" (without the quotes).

(By the way, I think the new Rodent II engine is a complete rewrite and can't be set by elo.)

I have found the bug. A silly bug.

I can´t publish now. I´ll send a new message when I can.

Thank you very much for the help.

You're welcome! :)

Cool!

Fixed.

I have created a new release (9.08b) to update or to download.

Thank you very much.

Wow, that was quick! I didn't do any exhaustive tests, but I did play a couple of games between the LC Rodent elo 600 and the Arena Rodent elo 600, and they both seem to be playing at roughly an equally horrible level.

Thank you for the great program Yup, works fine now, now even I can win against it

Can somebody tell me what I'm doing wrong in LucasChess, I was trying to play my own moves and yet, the bot says oh you earned points or lost points and makes their own move either way and I don't have a say in anything.