Just a mention of the Rodent IV chess engine

Thank you Berni314 for your contribution, and EscherehcsE for testing and feedback! And thank you soooo much nescitus for such a wonderful engine!!!   Since Chessmaster series is apparently dead (from 2007 ), the best personalities engine nowadays in the world is Rodent iv. It even has more personality features and characteristics than Chessmaster engine!! So i can't wait to know more about those personalities collection Berni314 is going to create 

If the community grab Rodent iv and starts to add more posible features, it will become incredible. I'm very bad at closed positions and this engine is allowing me to train them with personality Cloe, it's so helpful.

I tried to test Rodent iv "personalities persistent strength" problem in "Scid vs PC" GUI. So far it's not working. I tried every possible option, but maybe I don't know how to do it properly... at least i tried my best.

However, in android that problem has being fixed! At least when i test it in Droidfish.

I also tested Rodent IV in Arena in different tournaments with different rating levels in increments of 100 vs other engines rating levels (Shredder 13, Arasan 17.3, TheKing 3.50), and rating levels are working flawlessly (of course, I only could test in default personality, given that persistency issue).

Just an example of one of the test tournaments:

TheKing personality Kanna configured to 1617 rating

Shredder 13 configured to 1500 rating

Rodent iv configured to 1400 rating

TheKing personality Hayden configured to 1291 rating

Note: In parenthesis is written CCRL list rating, not configured rating for the tournament.

Where can I find a compiled version of Rodent IV for Mac?

I'm not a Mac user, so I don't know for sure if there is one. Maybe this?

https://github.com/nescitus/rodent-iv/blob/master/mac/rodentIV

@escherehcse yes, that is the official source and the path you referenced is the latest version (Rodent IV v0.32) compiled for Mac .  I found this after posting and still trying to get it to work.  The personalities aren't working for me with HIARCS.  I've posted to the development group and hope to get an answer.

maximum 25

@amad3 ?

The personalities are not working due to an issue with the Rodent home path detection, which I have just fixed. I am picking up chess myself and while pretty late in the game though I am a much better coder than chess player. I find the Rodent project pretty interesting and would be willing to either (a) create a Fork and maintain compatibility with Rodent-IV for a while, or (b) contribute to Rodent-IV if things are setup properly. Either ways the process and workflow needs to be cleaned-up. I am sure it is very difficult for one person to do all the work.

The messaging on this thread and on http://www.pkoziol.cal24.pl/rodent/rodent.htm leads me to believe that @nescitus would not be able to spend time on this.

@BrianErdelyi, let me know if you are still looking for the solution. I use Apple for dev and can help you out with the setup.

I'm a rank beginner and love playing on and collecting chess engines and boards, from DGT to Millennium. I currently really enjoy playing Rodent on my DGT smart board with the 3000Pi Clock.  As a beginner I still get a very fun game without the engine making really stupid plays like just handing over their queen :-). It feels like I'm actually playing with a person, albeit a person who plays chess better than I do! Thanks for your work on this.

Is it possible to install this engine into the Millennium Chess computers?

Side-loading engines in DGT and Millennium products is not an option AFAIK. You are able to load UCI engines in the open-sourced DaVinci chess software that is used with the Certabo smart chessboards.

https://www.certabo.com/prodotto/davinci-extreme-chess-computer-15-ghz-quadcore-processor-4-gb-ram-black-copy-2/

heheheh   DaVinci chess software?? i searched for it and it's so funny to see so much technology compared to my chessboard: a piece of paper with printed squares, glued to a cardbox

good

Thanks for this. I am a huge computer chess enthusiast. I wish we had more updates about the newest engines and stuff like this. Rodent in particular was a fun engine for me since I could build all kinds of cool personalities. I built one called "The Constrictor" whose entire purpose was not to play aggressively, but defensively as possible but to slowly crawl up the board and overwhelm you with space and take as many squares as possible away from your pieces so you just....couldn't move. The idea was you'd just strangle to death. I like SUPER customizable engines. I didn't know we had a Rodent 4 now!!

How do you build the personalities? I didn't know that..

wooow... i like that constrictor personality. Please, could you share it with us? do you have it for Rodent IV?

I don't know how is it for Rodent 3, but for Rodent IV there's a file that comes with the engine's zip file. Doble clicking opens a browser app, in which you can adjust parameters following instructions. Very intuitive.

The hard part is not building the personalities, but know how to adjust parameters in order to obtain the personality you were looking for, specially if you are trying to imitate a real life personality.

Just some comments: first, great engine and most fun to play against. I love the Tal personality in particular. Second: Elo persistence is likely GUI related. I have not had any issues using Final Rodent in HIARCS Chess Explorer Pro on macOS, and which I can highly recommend. Finally, you can find compiled versions for most platforms posted at chessenergia.eu.

For those of us that are having problems with the personalities ignoring the specified Elo Strength and playing instead at full strength: the workaround I have found:

Go to the personalities folder. There you will find txt files which have the UCI parameter values values for each personality. Edit those text files to add these two lines to each of them (obviously, instead of 800, use the Elo strength you want):

setoption name UCI_LimitStrength value true
setoption name UCI_Elo value 800

Only problem is, when you want to change the strength you will have to edit the files and change the value, but at least it works. The default personality does not have a txt file, but it's fine because that one respects the value set in the configuration screen for the engine in your GUI.