OSDev.org

Hi,

I am pretty good at chess. I have a USCF rating close to 1600 and improving, came very close to beating ex American Women Champion in a blitz game, I blundered towards the end. Have defeated few masters and class A players in chess games. My achievements in local tournaments include

• YMCA champion, Trivandrum
• OCSE champion, Trivandrum
• Unrated Champion - Larry Evans Memorial, Reno Nevada
• Class B winner in few tournaments in Minnesota.

I play wild gambits, Kings Gambit, Closed Sicilian, Kings Indian Attack as White. French Defense and Albin Counter Gambit as black.

Find KottayamAchayan on ICC or uvwy on FICS, ThomasMadappattu on chess.com.


--Thomas

At 13 I had every intention of being world champion.
(Didn't quite make it: I did draw with a grandmaster when I was 14. He wasn't a grandmaster at the time - but hey - that's a minor detail)
I am still playing at 63, but have now hit the age where decline sets in: each year the rating goes down just that bit more.
But it doesn't matter to me any more. I play 60 or so 3-4 hour games a year and enjoy every minute. Why should I want more?

I have written my own chess program. I can still beat that! (Err... I don't think that says much for my programming skill either )

I do know the rules of chess, and how to move the pieces around in a way that generally doesn't violate those rules... sort of... can I play chess? Most people who have seen me try would say no.

I don't play chess, but tried to learn the rules in 2013.

Everyone shall know chess there guys, it's too simple.
For all 16- people there shall ask their dads how to play chess, if they hadn't told them already.

Once I played chess against Martin Shkreli, he won

Lukand wrote:Everyone shall know chess there guys, it's too simple.
For all 16- people there shall ask their dads how to play chess, if they hadn't told them already.

Being good at chess isn't easy, and not everybody enjoys it.

Now I am close to 1700, want to hit the 2200 elo someday. Cosistency is the key, on a good day I beat people rated 2000+, but at times I lose low rated players. Consistent practice and a good workout regime should help me achieve my goals.

I sometimes play it with family or friends over a drink or snack. I've participated in a few (three) local competitions but let's just say I wasn't very good compared to other "professionals" there.

Life is not always gloom, recently finished third in a local tourney ( and winning my section !). Yay!. This was probably my best game. I am playing Black here , both of us are rated uscf 1700

David Trinski vs Thomas Madappattu. [0-1]

1.d4 g6 2.e4 Bg7
I played the modern defense here. Modern defense is a hyper modern defense and Black invites White to occupy the center, we attack Whites massive looking center with well timed pawn breaks!. I usually play the French defense, now shifted to modern because it allows me to complicate the game and seems to suit my maverick soul better.

3.Nf3 d6 4.Nc3 a6 5.Be3 Nd7 6.Bc4 e6

In line with my strategy, white occupies the center with grumption!, and I target his center!.

7.O-O b5 8.Bb3 Bb7 9.a3 c5 !?
I am not sure if this move is well timed, but it ask questions to white and give him chance to go wrong.
10.Qe2 c4 11.Ba2 Ne7 12.Rad1 h6 13.b3 cxb3 14.Bxb3 Rc8 15.Qd3 Nb6 16.Nd2 Nc4

White falls for a trick now, even if he plays correctly i have everything to play for and play remains complicated
17.Nxc4 bxc4 18.Bxc4?? This loses a piece Qc7 !, now Black is much better.

19.Bxa6 Bxa6 20.Qxa6 Qxc3 21.Qxd6 Qc6 22.Qf4 O-O 23.Qf3 Qxc2 24.d5 exd5 25.exd5 Nf5 26.d6 Nxe3 27.fxe3 Qc4 28.d7 Rcd8 29.e4 ?? A blunder by my opponent under time pressure.
Bd4+ 30.Kh1 Rxd7 My rest of notation is not clear, my opponent is under serious time trouble. I won this game after few more in accuracies by my opponent.

--Thomas

I was also a player of chess and my favorite move was knight but unfortunately it left this game as it consumes too much time.
sheepadoodlepeekapoocannabinoidhyperemesissyndromecleidocranialdysplasia


Infantigo

Reached 1800 uscf. So I am a class A player. Need 400 more points for the NM title which looks like an up hill battle.

--Thomas

DavidCooper wrote:What might be fun (though I don't have time to get involved) would be to write compact programs capable of playing chess to see who can write the strongest size-limited program (perhaps starting with 1024 bytes, then increasing it to 2048 once further progress becomes too hard in the smaller space, then 4096 bytes if necessary, etc.). Someone would need to write a host program capable of drawing the chessboard and pieces (if a visual display is needed - maybe it isn't, but it would be useful for reviewing the action, and it would allow people to play against one of the programs instead of only having programs play against each other), and this would also check that the moves are legal and decide who won. The two competing programs would be loaded in by the main program and would simply have to read the current board & timer and declare what their next move is whenever they're ready to play it. Each program would also be given a maximum size of workspace to ensure that neither can book more memory than the other.

Challenge accepted!

How does JavaScript sound? I'm not a huge JS fan, but in this case, I think it makes a lot of sense.

Update: I checked over at chess.com to see if they already had something that we could use to wire up an AI on the back end. They announced that they are planning on an Interactive API that could be used for something like this, but it's still pretty early in development, so it may be a year away or more. Still, I thought it was worth mentioning.

SpyderTL wrote:How does JavaScript sound? I'm not a huge JS fan, but in this case, I think it makes a lot of sense.

Maybe it would, if you want it to run online and emulate the machine code of the chess playing programs, but that would take a lot of work to set up. I was picturing a simple x86 operating system being adapted to become a host for the competing programs to run under, providing data showing where the pieces are in memory so that both programs can read it (but not alter it), and keeping the two programs and their workspace apart so that they can't interfere with each other.

To write a chess playing program (to run on the host OS), you would assemble or compile it to run at a particular address and to use a restricted address range as workspace, being blocked from using any more than that. These programs would need to know where to find the data about where the pieces are, where the timers are, and how to communicate their moves to the host OS (which would then update the data about where the pieces are). It might initially be best if only one program is run at a time so that it isn't necessary for either to compute speculatively when it isn't its turn to make a move - it would thus know whenever it runs that its timer is ticking down and that its rival has just made a move. The timers' locations would be switched over after each move so that the program always sees its own timer at a fixed location and its rival's timer at a different fixed location (without having to check a variable to work out which timer is its own). The data about where the pieces are would also be adjusted after each move so that the programs don't need to care whether their pieces are black or white - they would simply be labelled in some way as "mine" and "enemy's", and these labels would be swapped by the host on each move so that the program can instantly recognise its own pieces, while the whole board would also be reversed so that the the program always plays in the same direction. This simplifies the chess-playing programs and allows them use their limited program size to focus purely on their game.

The OS would also handle the display of the board for humans to follow the action on, and to allow a human to be the opponent of a program. Setting this up would be a nice OS project for someone (and more than one might be written by different people too). Such an OS could run directly on real hardware or in an emulator, and it should offer a 640x480 graphics mode to make it emulator friendly (with the option of providing something more fancy as a selectable alternative). If a human wants to play against a program, the performance of the program will vary widely depending on the hardware used, but clearly the faster hardware would be better as a good human player should still be able to win with ease - it's unlikely to be a challenge, so the real purpose of playing against a program in this way would simply be to test how well it plays. The length of the game should be adjustable, as should the size of the program space and the size of the workspace (so that the host can adapt to cover different categories of the competition as things evolve in the direction of more complex and capable programs while the rules change to accommodate that).

But, which processor mode should be used for the programs? Real mode is no use as there are no protection mechanisms to stop the programs interfering with each other (or with the data about where the pieces are, or hacking the host). 16-bit modes might disappear from processors too at some point, so it may be best to require 32-bit mode from the start. Would there be compatibility issues between a host OS running protected mode and one using long mode though?


Edit: I realise now that the host program should ideally be an app running on an OS rather than part of an adapted OS, and that it should be able to protect itself in turn from the two chess-playing programs that run "under" it. Is this kind of functionality normally available in any OS with an app placing two binary blobs into their own address spaces and running them whenever it needs to while protecting itself and its data from them?

Its just few lines of python to write a simple chess engine that beat majority of the human players . I did this presentation to local python group in Minnesota, its rather brief. PFA
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/ ... sp=sharing

--Thomas

I realize that this is a very late reply, but I had missed this post when it first appeared, two years ago.

Lukand wrote:Everyone shall know chess there guys, it's too simple.
For all 16- people there shall ask their dads how to play chess, if they hadn't told them already.

You clearly don't know many Americans. The overwhelming majority of people here, regardless of age, not only don't know chess, but would think you were insane if you suggested they learn the game. How dare you suggest they were one of those egghead types!

And no, that's not just Georgia. Hell, I heard that sort of thing in Berkeley. From people in their thirties.

OK, I may be overstating this just a little. But it is really hard to express to people elsewhere the severe anti-intellectualism of the majority in the US (as if the political situation here, from both sides of the aisle, shouldn't have made it painfully clear long since...). Ask my Dad? I doubt he ever learned, and he considered himself to be the smartest person he'd ever met (he wasn't, not by a longshot, but that was his narcissism at work). The very fact that most people here see chess as the province of the most rarefied intellectual elite (a rather absurd view, really, at least regarding learning the basics) is itself proof of this.

But then, it doesn't involve a football (as in the American 'hand egg' type) or beer, doesn't have boobs, and isn't a kitten, a race car, or a piece of celebrity gossip, so most people here would assume it is intolerably boring anyway.