Good god the Computer Sucks At 1. d4: A Benoni Gone Terribly Wrong!

Aloha Brandon,

They (Chess.com) may rather you play real people I think at Turn-base or Live chess, as they are investing a lot of time and funds on it (programming) etc. Plus they like new members to have a chess engine to play and LCP is free and easy to place on website and so there you have it.

And as you noted LCP does not keep records of losses or wins, or draws, nor chess notation nor any rating. Plus most chess people do have a chess engine of some type at home their PC, Mac or Linux system and they rather play another person. Plus in between moves you have someone to play and beat on. Able not the new to chess players who may lose to LCP more often. Only guessing as to people's results with LCP.

Mahalo and look forward to discussions about other games with stronger chess engines!

 I have a different question. If LCP is such a bad engine why do you persist in playing it and posting your games against it in the forums ? What's the point ? As for why chess.com continues to use it I imagine LCP is very formidable against 90% of the new players that are coming to chess.com and I believe they are the intended target group for LCP.

Also, from a technical point of view, LCP is a java engine running on /your/ computer. This totally makes sense, as the computing power required to play games would put the chess.com servers down to a crawl if they had to play thousands of games at high level.

So what you ask ? Well,

1. now you have to download the engine when you play it. So it's got to be lightweight. Bye, big databases, fancy engines
2. it's got to be in java to play directly in the browser. As much as java made progress, it's still not quite as fast as native solutions...

So don't expect too much out of it!

bahbar sounds very reasonable!

FYI:

Rybka has a list of chess programs it works as well with and how to install.

http://www.rybkachess.com/index.php?auswahl=Installation

Rybka 3 64-bit 4CPU - Rating 3231

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rybka

Deep Fritz 11 4CPU - Rating 3095

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_(chess)

This link (below) has list of a whole lot of chess engines programmers have created, check it out!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_program

ChessMaster - History and rating 2700

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chessmaster

Little Chesspartner does not make this list.

Freely available chess engines

There are hundreds of freely available chess engines which conform to one of the above communication protocols. Many run on Windows or are open source. The top 50 strongest are listed here. Others may be found by examining the rating lists or external links.

Elo ratings taken from CCRL 40/40, computed on 24 July 2009.

I think it's called, "Little Chess Partner" and not "Depressingly Invincible Monster Chess Engine" for a reason,

FYI -- this game gets to a B33 sicilian position via bizarro move order at move 6.

Here's an example:

I agree, and to avoid miss use by players in other games!

NM Reb

I don't think it's a bad engine at all. It plays a good defense to 1. e4 and plays well with White using a variety of openings.

I've only been playing chess seriously for about 2 years total in my life, so I'm not completely familiar with some technical aspects of the game, i.e. how engines play chess and what their limitations are.

The computer beats me more than I beat it: not counting draws, I bat around .400 when I open 1. e4 and play Black. I was just so shocked that it self-destructed when I opened 1. d4 and thought I'd share my dismay. 

bahber

Thanks for the technical expertise :)

This thread probably should've included some context. Previously Brandon and I had a debate (in this thread) about how good LCP is. It thought it was about 1600. Brandon thought 2000. I showed a game where LCP made absolutely stupid moves. Brandom showed a game where LCP made seemingly strong moves. The question went unresolved.

So then, Brandon tries a new opening, and finds that LCP is actually not so strong in a different type of position. That's the reason he posted this game. I don't suppose he'll continue playing LCP over and over again in that type of position, because it's pointless. But if you usually score 40% against LCP, and suddenly one day destroys it in a miniature, then one could understand the surprise and excitement to post the game.

Hmm, even chess engines have bad & good days, depending on direction of play and their programming, of course!

To me, this site is more of a chess community site. If I want hardcore training, I'll just turn on some Vivaldi, crack open some books, and have a slugfest with Fritz and pick apart the game later. Chess.com for me is a fun place to play all of you, which is much more pleasant than playing a lifeless javabot. LittleChessPartner can't tell a joke to save his life. I'd rather have them allocate the computer resources towards other things than making a computer more competent at crushing my skull.