MENU
Beauty of Computer Chess
INTRODUCTION
Nowadays millions of computer chess games are played each day either to create better datasets for neural networks or testing engine changes. And actually none of those millions of games is ever looked at because only the result matters, does the engine play stronger or not. And in those millions must be tens of thousands most interesting and beautiful games that will never see the daylight. I like to introduce a tool that filters large PGN collections and store the most interesting games in much smaller separate PGN's. Some examples :
Games with scores
Games without scores
Inspired by the idea of Stefan Pohl EAS tool one can even make a sort of rating list which engine is the best king attacker or overall most aggressive engine.
Our BoCC (Beauty of Computer Chess) tool takes a different approach, first of all the emphasis is not so much on the rating list but on the PGN output with scores and depths, secondly as first step it evaluates every game on KING-ATTACKS and applies a bonus, and third as second step it evaluates each game as shortie, not on the length of the game but on the point (move number) a game is considered won, the rest of the moves till mate are irrelevant.
​
We maintain 3 rating lists of different elo pools, the strongest of CEGT 3578 elo, the medium of CEGT 3500 elo and an entry elo pool of CEGT 3400 elo, the latter available for engines >= 3100 elo, such as HCE Komodo 14.1 with its Aggressive option and doing well. Meaning each of the top style engines (Patricia, CSTal, Rebel, Velvet) has to play 3 x 15.000 = 45.000 games for a reliable rating.
The BoCC 3578 elo rating list
Remarks
. Rebel-Extreme-1.1 [new] seems to be the best KING-ATTACKER by a small margin. CSTal 2.1 EAS the overall leader.
. Surprisingly Fritz 20 is the best ELO engine, even more aggressive than Stockfish 17.1
​. What really matters (to me, that is) are the output PGN's for each engine, included in the download and enjoy the games. These are the kind of games I fell in love with chess as a teenager, the Morphy style, attack......!
. To enter the BoCC list an engine must have won at least 100 games, else it will be ignored. Patrica 3.01 hardly made it with 103 won games, that's less than one percent of the 15.000 games it played.​
Elo pool opponents 3500
​
Previous [above] elo pool was 3578 CEGT elo, perhaps a bit too strong for the current 4 playing style engines Chess System Tal, Patricia, Velvet and Rebel. Hence we try another elo pool of 3500 to see if the results remain consistent.
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​​
Remarks
. On 3500 elo the numbers are lower than on the 3578 elo pool.
. Interesting, ELO engines Stockfish 17.1 and Fritz 20 surpassed STYLE engines Velvet 8.1, Patricia 4, Patricia 5 and Rebel EAS 2.0.
Elo pool opponents 3400
​
​
​​
​
​
​
​​
​​
​​
​
​
​​
. A new style engine made its entry, Komodo-14.1 with the Aggressive setting. Very good for a HCE engine!
DOWNLOADS
. Download and enjoy the games in king-attacks.pgn and the shorties split into shorties-10,15 and 20.pgn
. Especially the shorties-10.pgn where a game is decided within 10 moves (after the book moves) are quite remarkable considering we in general are talking about engines > 3400 elo.
. Operation : double click BoCC.exe and pick a PGN from the menu.
. Changeable Parameters, open eat.ini
Won Game Minimum = 100 // engines with less than 100 won games are ignored, results are not very reliable.
Game Decided Margin = 300 // used in the filtering of shorties, when both engines agree on a score >= 3 pawns for at least 5 consecutive moves and the game is won, the game is considered won and a bonus is given depending on the move number, the lower the move number, the higher the bonus. With NNUE engines the 3 pawn margin is pretty reliable.
BoCC-3400
BoCC-3500
BoCC-3578
PGN output
Special attention for the PGN output of the king-attack and shorties output as useful information is added.
2 examples on Talkchess .
OTHER
King-Attack Tool
Extract King-Attacks from PGN
Use the margin parameter in king-attack.ini to filter games. It works ~15 times faster than BoCC because it does not have to do all the rating list calculations.
BoCC-Game-Collection
All King-Attacks and Shorties
All BoCC rating lists
Special thanks to Stefan Pohl contributing 2.7 million games of his rating list
BoC human-human games.
Work in progress
Work in progress