Hydra is a chess computer, that by the Austrian Dr. Christian "“Chrilly"” Donninger, German Dr. Ulf Lorenz and Christopher Lutz, as well as the company PAL computer of system from Abu Dhabi is developed.

History

A forerunner of the program was called Brutus and by the company ChessBase in order was given. After disappointing cutting of an early version off with the computer chess world championship 2003 in Graz ChessBase continued to pursue the project not, because no commercial usability was seen. It succeeded to the Hydra team thereupon to find with the company PAL computer of system from the united Arab emirates a new backer.

Successes

The partial developed program further Hydra again, partly struck 2004 the repeated computer chess world champion Shredder in a match in Abu Dhabi with 5,5:2,5. In the same year the program obtained 3.5 points from four portions with a comparison fight against players of the world point in Bilbao. In June 2005 Hydra in London succeeded a surprisingly with 5,5-0,5 high match victory over the English world class player Michael Adam. Hydra was not struck so far ever by a human chess player in a tournament portion (conditions April 2006). Only in remote chess as well as in the so-called "“Freestyle chess"”, with which analysis support is permitted by computers, the program was already several times defeated. The developers already indicated to 2005 a play strength of over 3000 Elo points.

In April 2006 Hydra won the PAL/CSS Freestyle tournament, with which the participants were allowed to use arbitrary chess programs, delivered over chess servers, ungeschlagen with 5,5 points from 7 portions and seems thereby also its past relative weakness in the Freestyle Chess to have overcome.

Hardware

Hydra consists of a computer cluster from at present 32 Intel Xeon processors, which generate the search tree, and 32 FPGA maps, running under Linux, which acknowledge the evaluation of the positions distinguished and to the program. The most sensitive part of Hydras search algorithm runs distributed on the mentioned Xeon processors, which are connected by a Myrienet high-speed network. Each processor serves its own FPGA map, and the expiration of the distributed algorithm is in the reason as follows: One of the processors gets the current chess position and begins a sequential alpha beta search. The other processors send work inquiries coincidentally in the net around, and if a processor, which cooperates already meaningfully in the current chess problem, catches such an inquiry, it delivers a sub-problem of its own (part) problem. With the help of a sophistiated communication network between the processors the work which can be performed becomes dynamically balanced and it develops only small Suchoverhead. After a while all processors have to then do somewhat meaningful, and each individual processor evaluates chess positions in its search tree with the help of its FPGA "„Koprozessors "“. A Hydra processor produces approx. 100,000 small searches on a FPGA map per second.

The advantage of the FPGA map is that a complex knowledge-based weighing function can be implemented, without impairing the search speed considerably. At present the program can about 200 million positions per second scan and evaluate. Thus it is about 200 times faster than chess often commodity on a standard PC. The following picture shows a schematic representation of the Hydrahardware.

Opening library

For the opening book of Hydra the German large master Christopher Lutz is responsible. Contrary to other programs, whose opening repertoire is based on portions played by chess masters, it is not very extensive, since the program can calculate often better courses independently.

Related links

• Official homepage

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Related Websites

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• ChessBase.com - Chess News - All about the Hydra chess project
  Publisher of high quality chess programs and databases. Offers a free access to a regulary updated online database.


• HYDRA CHESS . com
  ... when the leading team 'Zor_champ' (UAE) with Hydra had to defend itself ... one was the big surprise of this mixed engine and Advanced Chess tournament. ...