The Honey chess engine, with adaptive playing strength

I noticed an announcement on the Talkchess forum for the Honey engine. It's a fork of Stockfish, with a number of modifications. You can set the playing strength by Elo, and you can also set it to automatically adapt to your playing strength. The adaptive feature is in three levels: Novice, Advanced, and Expert.

A very similar engine named Crystal-Honey is also available.

I'm still messing around with it, trying to get familiar with it. You can set the Elo level AND the adaptive level at the same time for an even greater weakening effect. To see how low it could go, I set the Elo to 1000 and the adaptive level to Novice. After about 6 to 8 games, the engine was able to play down to the level of the Delfi Trainer 5.4 Elo 1000 engine, which is a fairly weak "1000 Elo" engine. I was NOT able to get Honey to play down to the level of the Ufim 8.02 elo 700 engine, which plays really bad chess. (Either it just can't go that low, or the 40 games weren't enough games.)

I did notice one possible glitch - I ran the test in Arena, and I noticed that when I used the Arena GUI book for the Honey engine, the adaptive feature didn't seem to work. This problem was solved by installing a polyglot book into the Honey engine via the engine configuration window. (Just place the polyglot book in the same folder as the Honey engine.)

I don't know for sure where the Honey engine saves the adaptive information. However, I did notice that if I cleared the hashtable, the adaptive setting seemed to get reset. So, I suspect this adaptive information is stored in the hashtable.

Here's the thread with the download links:

http://talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=71742

And here's a thread discussing more of the details:

http://talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=71633

Here's a screenshot of my engine settings for an Elo of 1000 and a Novice adaptive setting. (Note that the Elo setting is not set in this configuration window - it's set separately, at least in the Arena GUI.)

thank you for the tip, did you have more fun in the meantime with this promising engine?

Ah, I guess I'm now busted... I've been running numerous engine-engine tournaments lately, so I haven't had much time to try out the Honey engine. I'll put it on my "to do" list.

eheh, will soon come a ready to plug solution without too many hacks. At the moment I am having fun annotating games on chessbase on Android. And if I want to enjoy an adaptive feature, can play an online game on the base of my elo, or Shredder Chess on Android that has adaptive ELO, and also signal on real time the level of advantage, and finally have also fritz gui, and now arena with your suggestions. So as consultants say no need to boil the ocean, enjoy your cool engine-engine tournaments