Blunder Wins Its First Tournament!
Over the past couple of weeks, Graham Banks (a long time respected tester and member of the chess programming community for those of you who may not know) held a tournament, dubbed Gandalf and the Spinning Blade. Here Blunder was pittied against a slate of many other very strong engines, including part of the namesake of the tournament title, Gandalf, an older commerical chess engine.
After a hard fought battle for first, Blunder managed to come out on top and win its first tournament! Scoring 2.5 points ahead of CM9000 and Gandalf, the runners up:
27.5 - Blunder 8.0.0 64-bit
25.0 - CM9000 Enforcer
25.0 - Gandalf 7 64-bit
23.5 - Drosophila 1.6 64-bit
23.0 - Zevra 2.5 64-bit
22.5 - MadChess 3.0 64-bit
21.0 - Rotor 0.8
21.0 - Nebula 2.0 64-bit
20.5 - Lozza 2.3 64-bit
19.5 - Philou 3.7.1 64-bit
19.0 - Raven 1.20 64-bit
16.5 - Leorik 2.1 64-bit
What I found funny was towards the end of the tournament, Blunder put itself in a position to win by just playing safe. If it drew the last three games, it guaranteed itself a win, regardless of what second place did. And Blunder did just that, drawing its last three games, one of them quite quickly.
I was worried Blunder would push too hard for a win in the last three games and let the front spot slip away, but Blunder seemed to bee-line for a draw in all three games, almost as if it had the awarness of a human player and knew all it had to do was play it safe. Either that or Blunder’s too drawish, but I prefer the former explanation :-)