Immortality on animals

The good news is that you can be immortal. The bad news is that you have to become a floating blob of jelly to do so. Scientists have discovered a jellyfish which can live forever.

Turritopsis dohrnii is now officially known as the only immortal creature. The secret to eternal life, as it turns out, is not just living a really, really long time. It’s all about maturity, or rather, the lack of it. The immortal jellyfish (as it is better known popularly) propagate and then, faced with the normal career path of dying, they opt instead to revert to a sexually immature stage.

Turritopsis rubra – Commonly confused with immortal jellyfish

(c) Photo Credit: Peter Schuchert/The Hydrozoa Directory

It turns out that once the adult form of the 4.5 mm-wide species Turritopsis dohrnii have reproduced, they don’t die but transform themselves back into their juvenile polyp state. Their tentacles retract, their bodies shrink, and they sink to the ocean floor and start the cycle all over again. Among laboratory samples, all the adult Turritopsis observed regularly undergo this change. And not just once: they can do it over and over again.

Thus, the only known way they can die is if they get consumed by another fish or if a disease strikes the jelly. However, there are still many mysteries surrounding the turritopsis dohrnii. While the process of reverting from its adult-phase to a polyp was observed several times, it hasn’t been observed yet in nature, only in laboratory environments.

Turritopsis nutricula vs Turritopsis rubra vs Turritopsis dohrnii

There was a lot of confusion even inside the scientific community between the three types of turritopsis jellyfish: the dohrnii, the nutricula and the rubra. Simply put, the turritopsis genus can be found in many parts of the world and it it is not an easy task to differentiate between these tiny jellyfishes.

The nutricula was for a long time mistakenly the one referred to as the immortal jellyfish, while the jellyfish used in the lab observations was the turritopsis dohrnii, as they were collected from the Mediterranean, where the dohrnii is found.

The nutricula is found in the Caribbean and North America and the cycle reversal was not in fact observed on the nutricula. That doesn’t mean that the nutricula isn’t biologically immortal but that it has not yet been observed and proven that. When the study (Bavestrello et al. 1992;

Piraino et al. 1996, 2004) was published, the difference between the dohrnii and nutricula wasn’t clear yet and afterwards the media distributed the information that the nutricula would be the immortal one.

And finally the rubra is a turritopsis that can be found next to New Zealand waters. Its photos can be found all over the web describing the nutricula, but the rubra wasn’t even observed to be immortal. Its shape is similar to that of the nutricula, but it is bigger (it can reach 7 mm versus the 4.5 mm of the nutricula).

So chances are that if you ever hear about the nutricula being immortal, it is in fact the dohrnii but a picture of a rubra will be attached.

http://immortal-jellyfish.com/

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study has concluded that the red sea urchin, a small spiny invertebrate that lives in shallow coastal waters, is among the longest living animals on Earth – they can live to be 100 years old, and some may reach 200 years or more in good health with few signs of age.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/11/031106051646.htm

Tuning Books CTG

Tuning Books CTG:

By goldminer_999

Here is one way to hand tune the book that I have found very successful although it takes some time and effort. Use the book to play some engine games. Then play back over the games until you reach the point where either the book line ends and there are no more book moves, or the point at which you begin to get negative evaluations. Then set your engine on infinite analysis for a while so it goes quite deep in it's search and by doing this you will find the best next move - then add this move to the book line to extend it. Then next time your engine plays the same line it will make this better stronger move!

To manually edit the book go into Fritz and do File/Open/Openings Book and select the book you want to edit. Then select the Openings Book tab on right hand side of screen. Basically you can either:

•             Add a new move to the book, To do this right click somewhere in that book area (not on a move just in empty space) and tick Allow Move Adding. then when you play back through a game and want to add new line, just make the move on the actual board and then select new main line from the options. This will then have added the move to the book. You can do this for as many moves as you like so you can extend a book line quite significantly.

•             Change the 'weighting' of an existing move making it more/less likely to be chosen. This is shown in the Prob / % column. To change it right click on the actual move itself and do change weight. The value is from -125 (very unlikely to be picked) to +125 (very likely to be picked). You can change these manually to any value. Actually this is what the automatic book learning does based on whether games are won or lost - but this is how you do it manually.

•             Mark moves either red (means they won't be played ever) or green (mean they will be picked, with a probablility given by the % column). To make a move red right click on it and select Don't play in tournament

To make a move green right click on it and select Main Move. You might want to make a move red if you find that at some point in the book line you had a negative evaluation and therefore you can mark that move red so it won't be played again.

Retrieved from my lovely best forum site

http://www.autochess.com/forum/tuning-and-making-books-ctg-t1209.html

Best commercial and non commercial Opening Chess Book CTG

HIARCS Chess Opening Book Subscription World's Strongest Chess Openings Book¹ Suitable for all players from beginners to the World Chess Champion Platform: PC Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone/iPad Latest update 30th September 2015: Tournament book 14,254,799 positions/moves, 834,277 variations based on 1,071,330 high quality games http://www.hiarcs.com/chess-opening-book.htm

Tuning and Making Books CTG

Tuning and Making Books CTG:

By Dagh Nielsen

Let me try to give a brief introduction to book making and tuning, as it applies to the Chessbase CTG books.

There are essentially 4 components in making/tuning a book:

• Choosing and importing games to the book.
• Choosing which openings/lines to play by coloring red and green.
• Expanding the book by manually adding green moves to the lines you have chosen to play (or maybe by "adding priority analysis" or games).
• Adjusting the weights of moves, often done automaticly through play on the playchess.com server,but can also be done manually.

Any combination of these 4 can be applied by the book-maker to reach a desired result.

The very basic behaviour of any opening book is that it recognizes a position and decides that it will tell which move to play, instead of letting the engine decide. The task of the book-maker is to decide in which positions he wants the book to make that decision, and to make sure that the book makes a good decision.

Very obvious, but there's several ways to go about it, since different parameters in the book determine how it makes those decisions. You would want to play around with these parameters so they match your general approach - what parts of 1-4 above do you use, and where do you put in most of your efforts. Also, what are the playing conditions, etc.

The parameters are:

• "Tournament book" - I think it is essential to turn this ON, or your color marking will not have any effect as far as I understand.
• "Variety of play" - Should book only play move with the best stat, or also try others?
• "Influence of learn value" - This concerns the weights associated to the moves. If you play on server, and a move gives some bad results and thus gets a negative weight, then the book will tend to avoid this move if you put this parameter in the high end.
• "Learning strength" - How fast do you want the weights to be changed? One bad result or several bad (good) results are needed before the weight of a move changes a lot?
• "Minimum games" - how many times does a move need to be "played" in your book (based on the imported games) before the book will consider the stats of the moves in order to reach a decision?

And then one of the most important "parameters" in my view: Move coloring. If you make a move green, a higher preference is given to this move. If you color a move red (and at least one other move in the position is green), the book will not make this move.

Before going on to some practical hints and considerations, just one general remark: How would YOU determine the success of your opening book? This can be answered in as many ways as there are book makers, and I think it is sensible to think about it once in a while while you work on your book. Is blitz Elo on playchess server your success criteria (or maybe only slow game Elo?)? Do you find it funny to make weird lines work out OK? Do you want a broad book playing "everything", or do you want a narrow book focusing on a few pet lines?

Fun can be had in many ways, and while I also find it very funny to compete on Elo, it is certainly also funny sometimes to give yourself a few personal challenges, like, "I really want this crazy gambit to work out OK", or, "I want my book to know this opening to depth 30 in all lines!", or whatever. My point is, success (and fun!) is how YOU define it, not ONLY Elo.

OK, some practical hints and considerations:

• Most people agree that the decision on which games to base your book on is quite important. They should be high quality Smile Once they are in, there's sadly no way getting them out. I think one good approach is using a collection of recent high level games from the playchess server. These games have been played by engines using already very strong books.
• One can also take some already made (by another person) book, and use this as basis for further tweaking/expansion (for personal use only ). For example, the Rybka book by Jeroen Noomen and the Takker TourbookII are quite strong, but some lines are not really covered by these. Instead, one could use a more broad book like for example the Fritz 9 book as start. Either way, the advantage of this approach is that then one can focus on a few pet lines and improve them, while your book is also covered reasonably well in lines you do not care to work further on. But in the end, I think most people will want to make their own book from scratch Smile There is also a chance that this will give higher diversity on the playchess server.
• By choosing a good base of games, you are already on your way to a fine book. You can then let it play a lot of server games in order to tune the weights, and you will have a fine book in the end.
  HOWEVER! You will only get so far doing this. To further improve your book (and make it more personal!), you need to get some dirt under your nails Smile This means analysing played games, or variations you want your engine to play, and then expand the book in these lines by adding green moves.
  And maybe choosing which variations/moves NOT to play by marking these moves red. Improving your book in this way is an endless task, but also where all the fun lies IMHO Smile You can ALWAYS further improve your book by doing some work in your personal analysis laboratory.
• In Fritz 9, you can choose some keyboard shortcuts for coloring moves under "tools - customize".
  This can save you a lot of time and frustration.
• Parameters - There are as many preferred ways to combine these as there are bookmakers. I suggest playing around with them so they fit your CURRENT task. To make an analogy, Magnus Carlsen and his trainer for some time defined success as how much Magnus learned, and not the score on the tournament table. Likewise, for some time, you can "experiment" with new lines and choose loose parameters, and maybe later, when you have drawn some conclusions from the games and added some analysed moves and you are satisfied with the result, you can go back to some "bests of the bestests setting".
• Go and kibbitz some games in the engine room on the playchess server. They will get added automaticly to one of your databases. You can then either import these into your book, or just use them as inspiration for further manual research. Some people on the server are paranoid about kibbitzers following them and thus learning all their secrets Smile Well, I really have no opinion on this, and I understand the pros and cons. I don't know if it would be a good idea if they made a "no kibbitzers" playing mode.
• Maybe get some good friends on the server and exchange games with them. Not all people are too paranoid, or maybe you just want to conspire with others and help justify the paranoia.

At any rate, have fun book-cooking and competing! And in a few years time when you have grown exhausted from this, maybe we can meet in normal playing room and have a good old-fashioned game of human blitz Very Happy. 

Enjoy!!!

Syzygy tablebases: maximizing performance

by Albert Silver

2/10/2015 – Tablebases are wondrous tools to help analyze the endgame, and improve engine evaluation, but they do come at a cost. While the five-piece set will easily fit into almost any computer's memory without accessing the hard disk, the much larger files for six pieces can cause significant slow downs on some machines. Here are some tips to maximize performance.

The benefit of using the tablebases should be obvious to any. Even though computer chess experts argue that the precision of the knowledge is almost exactly offset by the fractional loss in speed when it analyzes endgames, anyone who has seen the engine produce wildly optimistic evaluations due to a misunderstanding of rook endgame realities, or material imbalance that has no hope of winning, will appreciate being able to trust the evaluation and not ask themselves whether this position is one of those exceptions.

Six piece positions can be even harder, such as rook versus bishop and two pawns, queen versus rook and two pawns (think of the numerous fortress situations), and the list goes on. The problem is that some of the files of the more difficult positions can take up one or even two gigabytes a piece. If the engine is accessing more than one due to the various situations it is considering, it can cause the computer to start reading the hard disk non-stop, which in turn can result in significant slowdowns. This is not related to ChessBase's DVD set, or any of the ChessBase programs, it is simply the nature of 20GB or more of files constantly being consulted to read the results as the engine looks something up.

Even the best hard drives, such as this Black Edition of Western Digital, may have
issues accessing all the information needed at the speeds the engine requests.

Not all computers will have any issues, so if you do not, then do not concern yourself any further. If you do, however, there are a variety of ways to resolve this issue, so that you need not forego on this great tool.

Use an SSD

The easiest solution is to install the files on an SSD. These are digital storage devices, much like a pendrive, that can be used like a hard disk, but are many many times faster. They have many benefits that exceed tablebases of course. Booting up a computer in which the operating system was installed will take a fraction of the time it would on a normal hard disk. If you have ever found yourself tired of waiting for a program to open or close, SSDs will more or less end that issue.

SSDs are incredibly fast, and can greatly improve your overall computer performance, not just
for tablebases as being suggested here

Finally, for the purposes of this article: installing the tablebases on the SSD will unquestionably solve any performance issues, if you had any.

There are two caveats that need to be mentioned: if you are running the engine on a laptop that doesn't already have an SSD, this solution may not be feasible, and the second is the cost. Although prices have plummeted since they first came out, a 256GB SSD can cost upwards of $100 in the US, which may not be acceptable to everyone.

Use a Pendrive

In many ways, this is the Goldilocks solution, providing enormous performance improvements, without the SSD's cost, and completely workable on a laptop as well. It also means you can use the tablebases on a laptop even if you do not have a DVD drive to install them from.  

For this solution, all you need is a pendrive that is big enough to fit them, which for the ChessBase
set means about 20GB of files, so a 32GB pendrive. It is also recommended that you use a USB 3.0
pendrive, as it will be considerably faster. Nowadays that will cost under $15.

Installing on a pendrive

There is nothing to it. Just find the Tablebases directory where you installed the files, in my case
my second hard disk (D:), and then copy them to your pendrive.

Configuring ChessBase to use a pendrive

Even if you were able to install the DVDs directly to a pendrive (I have not tested this, but imagine it is possible), if you take the pendrive to another computer, that copy of ChessBase or Fritz will still need to be configured. Thankfully, though there are a few steps to follow, it is not hard.

In ChessBase or Fritz click on File at the top left, and then Options

In the pane, click on the Tablebases tab at the top, and then the More... button

A new pane will open, specifically for configuring various tablebases. Choose Syzygy (Engine)
and then click on the [...] next to the three paths. Here you will need to show it where to find
the tablebases.

For each path, configure one of the three directories as above. Once done, click on Ok, and then Apply.

Now, whenever you turn on Komodo 8, or any other engine that supports the Syzygy tablebases such as Houdini 4 or Stockfish, it will use the Syzygy bases installed on the pendrive.

Using only five-pieces

Why would you want to do this? If you do not have an SSD or a pendrive, want the tablebases, but are suffering from slowdowns, you can use the following compromise: use only the five-piece set. Since they are under 1 GB, and can easily fit in the computer's RAM.

In the same configuration screen as above, click on Clear, and then set only the path for the
five-piece set. The directory is Syzygy345. Leave the others blank.

If you find yourself having to use this last scenario as a solution, I strongly suggest you get a pendrive for the six-piece set. The cost is small, but the information those six-piece tablebases add is truly not to be underestimated. It means that everytime its search leads to one of those situations with six pieces, it can stop searching as it knows exactly the result and evaluation. 

The Syzygy Tablebase DVDs can be found in the ChessBase Shop

Albert Silver
originally retrieved from http://en.chessbase.com/post/syzygy-tablebases-maximizing-performance

Syzygy Tablebases

Syzygy Tablebases: newest, fastest, smallest

by Albert Silver

2/8/2015 – The concept of tablebases is not new, and there have been several generations of them, such as the Thompson tablebases, the Nalimov tablebases and more. The latest engines such as Houdini 4 and Komodo 8 provide special support of the new Syzygy format. Discover what is so special about them, why you should not be without them, and learn just how easy they are to install.

Tablebases have been a boon to chess players and researchers. They represent the absolute indisputable truth of a position, that cannot be ignored. A complete five-piece tablebase set means that everytime the position is reduced to five pieces (these always include kings), such as king+rook against king+rook+pawn, there are no calculations to be made. There is an immediate and absolute result.

For over a decade now, the reference tablebase format has been the Nalimov set, created by Eugene Nalimov. The first five-man set came out in late 1998, and the six-man set was completed by 2005. They represented an important evolution over the previous standard Edwards tablebases, since the five-piece set took up a mere 7.1 GB, which was about eight times smaller than the predecessor.

That is why the new Syzygy Bases are such an important step up. Developed by Ronald de Man, and published in 2013 for the first time, the Syzygy Bases consist of two sets of files, WDL files storing win/draw/loss information considering the fifty-move rule for access during search, and DTZ files with distance-to-zero information for access at the root. The practical difference is that the full five-piece set of files takes up less than 1 GB, in other words they are over seven times smaller than the Nalimov tablebases.

Of course, while freeing up 6 GB on your hard disk is a nice gain, it is hardly cataclysmic in today's age of hard drives with thousands of GB. More importantly though, this advantage spreads to the six-piece set also, where this size difference is much more evident. The complete six piece Nalimov tablebases take up about one full terabyte, or 1000 GB. As a result, the Nalimov tablebase DVD set offered by ChessBase contains only a careful selection of the most useful six-piece combinations. What would a 'useless' one be? Examples might be King+Queen+Queen versus King+Bishop+Pawn, and so forth. The engine can win this easily, and adding these tablebases are not going to improve performance. However, even so, some potentially useful ones would be missed due to space considerations.

The Syzygy Bases come on four DVDs, and can easily be installed within minutes

Theoretically, you can track down and download all the Syzygy files on the internet (legally), and then install and configure ChessBase 12/13 or Fritz so that Komodo 8 can use them. Allow me to discourage you from this. I actually did this (Vive Le Geek) when the DVD set by ChessBase was not yet available and will say it is a tremendous hassle. It involves downloading each and every file, which number the hundreds, and unless you want to handpick the best ones as already done here, then the complete set will mean downloading over 140GB of files. You then need to configure the interface properly, which can be tricky sometimes. All in all, I don't recommend it, if only for the hideous bandwidth consumption.

The new Syzygy Base DVDs offered by ChessBase simplify this process so that even the least tech savvy user can enjoy them. You get the fullest experience with only the most superfluous piece combinations left out, and that most obvious advantage: the ease of use and installation. Just install the four DVDs, and you are done. ChessBase 12/13 will automatically be configured to access them, and as soon as you run an engine such as Houdini 4 or Komodo 8, they will consult them in their analysis. It is really that easy.

Installing  the Syzygy Bases

Installing them could not be easier. Starting with DVD 1, put it in the drive
and when the autoplayer asks you what to do, select Run Setup.exe

A new window will open asking you where you want to install them. The default is C:\Tablebases,
but feel free to change the location. Just be sure you have about 20GB free for this six-piece collection.If you own an SSD, then you should consider installing them there as it will greatly improve lookup speed and performance.

After click Install, just wait for it to finish copying the files. It will automatically configure ChessBase 12/13
or Fritz when it does

After it is done, just click on finish

After installing DVD 1, put in DVD 2 and repeat the process. Be sure to tell
it to install the in the same directory in case you chose a different one than
the default. You will need to do this for all four DVDs.

Testing the Syzygy Bases

Though there shouldn't be any need, if you want to be sure the process
worked, load up a simplified endgame

Start up the engine, and look at the analysis it produces. If you see tb= in it, then you are
good to go. The number means the number of positions in its analysis that it found in the
Syzygy table bases. Don't be surprised to see tens of thousand of finds as the position simplifies.

The Syzygy Tablebase DVDs can be found in the ChessBase Shop

Albert SilverBorn in the US, he grew up in Paris, France, where he completed his Baccalaureat, and after college moved to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He was champion of Rio de Janeiro with a peak rating of 2240, and was a key designer of Chess Assistant 6. In 2010 he joined the ChessBase family as an editor and writer at ChessBase News.

http://en.chessbase.com/post/syzygy-tablebases-newest-fastest-smallest

Perfect endgame analysis and a huge increase in engine performance: Get it with the new Endgame Turbo 4! Thanks to a new format the Endgame Turbo 4 is smaller, faster and yet has more scope. Four DVDs cover all five- and 27 of the most important six-piece-endgames and top engines such as Komodo Chess 8 and Houdini 4 play these endgames perfectly. But they also play other endgames much better because they can access the perfect knowledge of the Endgame Turbo! A must have for everyone wanting to improve in the endgame, correspondence players, endgame theoriticians, and friends of engine matches!

The Endgame Turbo 4 consists of 4 DVDs with endgame databases (Syzygy Tablebases). With the help of the Endgame Turbo, all five- and 27 six-piece endgames (including the sophisticated and practice-oriented endgame ¦, §, § - ¦) are played with absolute perfection. Likewise, top chess engines like Komodo Chess 8 and Houdini 4 handle endgames with more than six pieces much better since the programs can already access the endgame knowledge during the analysis. Definitely a must-have for correspondence players, endgame theoreticians and friends of engine matches! CONTENT The Endgame Turbo 4 contains all endgames with three pieces up to five pieces. Plus 27 of the most important endgames with 6 pieces. Six-piece endgames included on the DVDs:

System requirements

Minimum: Pentium III 1 GHz, 1 GB RAM, Windows Vista, XP (Service Pack 3), DVD-ROM drive, Deep Fritz 14, Komodo Chess 8, Houdini 4 or ChessBase 12/13, 20 GB free hard disk space. Recommended: PC Intel Core i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 GB RAM, Windows 7 (64 Bit) or Windows 8/8.1, DVDROM drive, Deep Fritz 14, Komodo Chess 8, Houdini 4 or ChessBase 12/13, 20 GB free hard disk space

End Game Table Bases

This egtb database is downloaded using utorrent and if u dont have it yet ,get it here

http://www.utorrent.com/

The Syzygy 6-men EGTB system is the recommended table base solution for Houdini.

For the Syzygy EGTB support you'll need to install the Syzygy EGTB files. At the time of writing all the Syzygy files are available for torrent download athttp://oics.olympuschess.com/tracker/index.php. The 3-4-5-men Syzygy are also available for direct download at http://olympuschess.com/egtb/sbases.

Update: the 6-men Syzygy are now also available as HTTP download, see http://tablebase.sesse.net/syzygy.

The total size of the 3-4-5-men files is 938 MB (290 files), the 6-men table bases require 149 GB (730 files).

For the Gaviota EGTB support you'll need to install the Gaviota EGTB files. At the time of writing they are available for download at the address http://www.olympuschess.com/egtb/gaviota. Download all 145 files and save them in a directory on your hard disk. The total disk space required is about 7 GB.

Alternatively you could skip the download and generate the tables directly on your own computer, please follow the instructions found at the Gaviota web site.

For the Nalimov EGTB support you'll need to install the Nalimov EGTB files. At the time of writing they are available for download at the address ftp://ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt/TB orhttp://tablebase.sesse.net. Download all files and save them in a directory on your hard disk. The total disk space required for the 3-4-5-men table bases is about 7 GB (290 files in total).

Alternatively you can order the tables on DVD from several suppliers, this is probably the more efficient way of obtaining the 6-men Nalimov table bases.

SyzygyPath

Folder(s) containing the Syzygy EGTB files. If multiple folders are used, separate them by the ; (semi-column) character.

Example: C:\tb\Syzygy345;C:\tb\Syzygy6

GaviotaTbPath

Folder containing the Gaviota EGTB files.

GaviotaTbCache

Amount of Gaviota EGTB cache memory in MB.

Default 64, min 4, max 1024.

NalimovPath

Folder containing the Nalimov EGTB files.

NalimovCache

Amount of Nalimov EGTB cache memory in MB.

Default 32, min 4, max 1024.

EGTB Probe Depth

Minimum search depth for EGTB probing.

Default 10, min 2, max 99.

You can reduce this value if the table base files are installed on a very fast disk, or if you are running less than 4 threads.

For more detailed explanations, see the EGTB support topic.

Retrieved from url

http://www.cruxis.com/chess/manual/index.html?game_play.htm