Toby-Tal notes

	Tobychess has created a powerful new chess engine called Toby-Tal. It is a very small new program using a lot of new ideas (size is app. 120k). Toby has 2 settings on its parameters, a checkbox for HyperTal on-off. When it is on, TobyTal takes great risks in attacking the enemy King and has a high contempt for draws.

	Early tests against Rybka 3.1 and other top engines indicate that we play at about 3150-3200 on AMD processors at all time controls. The program is actually optimized to run on intel chips and will play above this rating performance on intel machines. 

	As of Jan 2010 the engine works well on Windows Vista and Windows 7 with multi move. We plan a version for the start of Feb 2010 which runs as a UCI engine and uses tablebases in Windows XP as well. 

	TobyTal runs inside of the TobyChess program Deep Tactics as one of the engines. To start, click on the arrow adjacent next to the engine icon and select TobyTal. 

	To start as a UCI engine in Fritz, click on the drop down menus "Engine" - "Create UCI Engine" and select browse. Go to C: Program files/TobyChess products/ Deep Tactics 7.5/ Engines and click on TobyTal. This will install the engine in Fritz-Chessbase. You can also similarly install it into other interfaces such as Arena. 

	The engine size is only 120K so it is 1/23rd the size of Rybka and is the smallest engine I have seen that plays well. Almost everything in this engine is brand new and different than how other engines analyze. It also has a unique way of attacking the enemy king.

	We hope you enjoy the unique strength and playing style of TobyTal. We will update the web site and our customers as new versions and a multi core version becomes available.


Best Wishes, Tim Tobiason

Toby-Tal update

	My name is Tim Tobiason and I am the co-author and owner of TobyChess and the distributor of the TobyTal chess engine. In 2003, I hired a programmer to create Deep Tactics, an interface which does many wonderful things. Early on my programmer wrote a chess engine which found every checkmate at the end of every game in the chessbase database which we stored. It then analyzed backwards finding every possible way to force mate. We stored these and that is how we created the 12 million checkmates which we sell with Deep Tactics and Toby Tal. We discovered that the average mate in 4 has 140 solutions and the average mate in 6 has over 1,000 ways to mate so we have a reader which displays every branch of the tree in our trainer. We called this engine nutcracker and it is part of TobyTal.

	A year ago we created a new engine called serpent which beat Rybka every single game. It beat every engine every time except Hiarcs which got 4 draws in 16 games. Its elo rater rating was 3600+. It was designed to run on 128 bit machines and we ran it off of a server. This engine did not use trees, nodes, branches, etc. It created a new kind of table-base it could make on the fly and then plan on how to achieve the future positions. Authorities stepped in and stopped us from selling it and no amount of money would have changed this. I cannot divulge the rest of the story at this time. 

	I asked the programmer over the last year to make a new engine with our best ideas and last November he provided me with a test copy of Toby-Tal. It was small, 120K. It used nutcracker and ideas from Serpent although we still use searches, nodes and trees. I showed this to a customer in Kansas at that time and was told about a new engine that was out called Robollito. We did not release TobyTal at this time because we had a serious hash table read error which caused us to switch from 32 bit hash tables to 64 bit hash tables. This fixed the problem of our engine getting weaker over time from read errors from the old hash tables.

	On release of our engine a couple of weeks ago by e-mail and at the North American Open, I found I had received profane e-mails from "anonymous" accusing me of selling a clone (Robo). My website was attacked with millions of hits and taken out of business along with my e-mail for about a week while I was on the road. We are now back up running and I will address the issues which have been raised.

1. TobyTal is a unique engine which we created. It is 120K in size. Robo is 301K and Rybka about 2.3mg. Our engine is encrypted but not compressed. This is to protect our code which I paid to create and which I personally contributed to. It is our legal property with dozens of new ideas which I intend to protect. This is the first engine in which part of its program was actually written by another program.

2. It solves about 1/2 of the Nolot puzzles on Wikipedia. hese are puzzles too hard for chess engines to solve. On puzzle 9 we found a novel solution (Nxh6) which wins in every variation! Neither Robo or Ryka can solve more than 1-2 of the 20 puzzles. We find unique moves in many situations because of a special King attack routine we invented. I have seen arguments accusing us of being the same as Roby, etc because we play the same moves in a position that they do. When I run the positions in Fritz 12 it also finds the same moves, therefore Fritz 12 must be a clone too?
3. We have multi move and search move and Robo does not. We do not have tablebase support yet. We also have nutcracker and serpent code inside. 

4. We do not run on most windows XP systems (which we hope to fix soon) while the other engines do.

5. Using a checksum to compare the engines, we found about 5% identical code with Robollito which I consider convenience code used by all chess programs. Things like Quintz search and null move are common among all strong programs and we use some of these as wells. 

6. We play better chess than Robo or Rybka by 20-80 points right now which is a lot at that level. If you look at the games, they run in streaks. When we lose in the streaks, we have a hash table read error or other major bug which only happens in play game mode. It does not happen in analysis mode. Once this bug is found and fixed we may play a hundred points or more above Robo & Rybka!!  

7. Our engine is 32 bit bit but plays well vs the 64 bit versions of Robo and Rybka.

7. In the end if the Robo people wish to resolve this in court, we will happily submit our code to the court for 3rd party comparison under the courts supervision to ensure our code remains secret.

	I am selling our engine on-line and at tournaments. At the North American Open in Las Vegas, we sold 21 TobyTal's while Chess Palace told me they sold 5 Fritz 12's and 4 Rybka's. People could see the engine matches and install them on their own computer and test them themselves.

	I do not sell the engine online as a download. We only sell it with the Deep tactics interface and to prevent piracy, future versions will be tied to the interface like Fritz 12.

	The issues will be settled on the chessboard in the coming months. We will add tablebase support, new chess knowledge and make a windows XP version in the next few weeks and will hopefully fix the bug in the current version. I will send this to all of you as a free upgrade if you have already purchased TobyTal [Thanks for the business]. After that we will create multi core and 64 bit versions with opening learning and multi computer capabilities. This will be sold as Deep TobyTal for $89 or an additional $30 upgrade. 

	In 4-6 years, there ill be no more chess engines as chess will be solved and the moves will simply be looked up in tables (similar to the dinosaur methods of tablebases used today). Then all these chess engine arguments will be obsolete.

Toby