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In Contempt of Hate ¹

The Contempt Factor reflects the estimated superiority/inferiority of the program over its opponent. The Contempt factor is assigned as draw score to avoid (early) draws against apparently weaker opponents, or to prefer draws versus stronger opponents otherwise.

Too little Respect

For stronger programs it might be dangerous to avoid draws by Fifty-move Rule, as happened for instance at the 1st World Computer Rapid Chess Championship in the game between HIARCS and Alaric aka TerraPi ¹ .

Too much Respect

An example of too much respect appeared during the WMCCC 1990 in Lyon, Mephisto versus Échec ² . Échec had something like +4 pawn-units for the final repeated position, while it had almost a won game otherwise.

See also

• Chess Game
• CPW-Engine_search
• Draw
• Draw Evaluation
• Draw Scores
• Fifty-move Rule
• Playing Strength
• Repetitions
• Stalemate

Forum Posts

1998 ...

• Computers and Draws by Repetition by Jeff Anderson, rgcc, July 5, 1998
• Strange draw Junior5-Comet32 Amir? by Tony Hedlund, CCC, November 13, 1998

2000 ...

• Contempt factor by Benny Antonsson, CCC, February 25, 2002

2010 ...

• Playing better moves in drawish positions (anti-0.00) by Onno Garms, CCC, March 13, 2011 » Onno
• The importance of contempt by Don Dailey, CCC, August 28, 2011
• final drawscore testing results by Robert Hyatt, CCC, September, 13, 2011
• Tuning for rating lists ? by Marco Costalba, CCC, August 23, 2013
• Contempt and the ELO model by Michel Van den Bergh, CCC, September 05, 2013
• Time based contempt by Michel Van den Bergh, April 20, 2014 » Time Management

2015 ...

• Stockfish contempt factor by Kai Laskos, CCC, March 10, 2015 » Stockfish
• Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) scaling - K10.4 Contempt=0 by Andreas Strangmüller, CCC, May 11, 2017 » SMP, Komodo
• Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) scaling - SF8 Contempt=10 by Andreas Strangmüller, CCC, May 13, 2017 » SMP, Stockfish
• New Stockfish contempt by Jouni Uski, CCC, January 29, 2018 » Stockfish
• Wrong use of SPRT by Uri Blass, FishCooking, February 09, 2018 » SPRT
• Elo measurement of contempt in SF in self-play by Michel Van den Bergh, CCC, March 10, 2018 » Playing Strength, Stockfish
• Stockfish contempt testing by Leonardo Ljubičić, FishCooking, October 29, 2019 » Stockfish

External Links

• Contempt Factor from Bruce Moreland's Programming Topics
• Contempt factor from Mediocre Chess by Jonatan Pettersson
• Circle of Contempt - Prelude For The Implication, Artifacts in Motion (2009), Space Imaginary, YouTube Video

Watch on YouTube

References