Ruffian 2.0

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Ruffian 2.0

Reviewed 02/29/04

Ruffian 2.0 is a chess engine that was recently released by Schach Niggemann, a distributor of chess products that is based in Germany. This CD contains the most recent releases of Ruffian, along with the original free version (it contains Ruffian 1.0.1, 1.0.5, 2.0.0, and Ruffian Leiden 2003). When you purchase the CD, you will also be sent two more new versions of Ruffian (2.0.2 and 2.1), which will arrive via e-mail.

Ruffian is compatible with a wide variety of standard engine communications protocols, including UCI, Winboard and Winboard II. The CD also contains the Arena GUI, which represents the best free playing interface available at the current moment. In addition to the above windows compatible engines, the CD contains a linux version of Ruffian, that can be used with Xboard.

A full windows install takes 120M, but you can cut this back by not installing some of the spoken move announcements for other languages. The CD will also install tablebases (4-piece), so if you have them, do a custom install, and uncheck the option to copy the tablebase over to your hard drive. If you do both these things (leave off tablebases and extra announcements), your total install will be about 72M. Included in this are the Ruffian opening books, created by long time computer chess personality Djordje Vidanovic.

The Arena GUI

I will avoid discussing too many specifics of this GUI, since it can be freely downloaded if one so desires. I do think it has several very strong points in its favor. Perhaps the most important is the very quick and easy engine setup that requires virtually no intervention (or research) on the part of the user. As many of you know, setting up certain winboard engines can take a bit of research. Arena makes this process very easy by providing a nice setup file for just about every winboard engine out there. Arena can also search your hard drive for engines, and automatically set them up for you (very nice!).

I also felt that the opening book controls were very easy to use. There are three very straightforward sliders (plus some other threshold settings) that control engine play from the book: Priority, Number of games, and Win percentage. While it is perhaps more difficult to directly edit the books, it is very easy to setup handicapped games and the like, using Arena's book controls. In other words, professional opening book authors (and there are a  few out there) might wish for more features, but for the overwhelming 99.5% of everyone else, the controls will be very convenient.

While Arena is especially strong from a playing, and even engine tournament standpoint, its support for ICS play is still in its infancy. However, it does support a couple of interesting features for engine authors. One of these is the ability to talk to an engine using the ICS "tell" command. To my knowledge, this is not supported by any other ICS interface at this time.

In terms of analysis, multivariation mode is supported, as is automatic full game analysis. The latter is somewhat limited, so this particular GUI may not be your best choice for game analysis. However, once again, there are a couple of unique features that some people may appreciate. One is an analysis board that is accessible from the right-click context menu. This board is even functional when using k-best mode.

Arena also supports quite a few engine vs. engine features, and it is one of the stronger areas of the program. In addition to the standard functions (i.e. round robin and swiss tournaments) there is autoplayer support, and sophisticated game evaluation logging. In effect, the GUI can watch for changes in the game evaluation, and save these critical positions to an EPD file. This makes it easier for engine developers to tune their engines, and find bugs and/or mis-evaluations. You can set the threshold (if value decreases X centipawns), and the number of moves (within X moves) in which the change in evaluation happens. If you choose a high value for the threshold (say 300) only big blunders are saved to the EPD file.

I would also give Arena high marks for its many user interface settings. It offers full control of colors for just about every aspect of the GUI. Arena can also use True Type fonts for display of pieces, so this makes the board display very clean and easy to read. And for those that don't want to play with an on-screen board, full DGT support is provided.

And last, but not least, Arena has a very vibrant user community. There are continuous enhancements being made to the GUI, and new engine books, settings, etc are constantly being offered on their website. They also have a very interesting forum there, and it is a good resource for arena users.

The Ruffian Engine

The following text is taken from Schach Niggemann's website:

Ruffian is a fast program that reaches high search depth very quickly, and this gives it excellent tactical abilities. Extensions, pruning and evaluation have been carefully tuned to maximize Ruffian's playing strength. Mobility is based on precalculated tables that can recognize special patterns; this is one of the major evaluation terms. Ruffian has a lot of endgame knowledge and can play endgames fairly well. With the combination of endgame tables, Ruffian knows when to convert to a winning endgame. Search is based on iterative deepening, principal variation search algorithm (PVS), extension, SEE, transposition tables, recursive null-move and forward pruning.

Based on my research, I think Ruffian is probably a better engine to use at longer time controls. Also, in some of my blitz engine vs engine tournaments, I noticed that Ruffian sometimes did not do so well when matched against engines that really place a lot of time pressure on their opponents (i.e. Tiger). Surely this is an issue of time management rather than quality of play. In terms of strengths, Ruffian knows how to utilize passed pawns well, and it seems especially good in positions that are unclear, or that have doubled isolated pawns. One weakness that I noted in version 2.0 was a propensity to move the pawns around its king, thus creating holes to be exploited. However, this looks to be fixed in versions 2.0.2 and 2.1.0.

It bears noting that Ruffian scores well against both deep Fritz, and the King (Chessmaster). If you consider that these two engines are probably found on more hard drives than any other, you quickly realize that Ruffian provides a nice alternative opinion for users of these two programs.

Incidentally, I also feel that I should comment on the various iterations of Ruffian. In the course of doing this review, I looked at a number of Ruffian games that were downloaded off the web, and played on my computer. In general, I place more faith in the tournaments that other experts ran, rather than my own (there are many gotchas to running a fair eng-eng tournament). It was not easy for me to form a consistent opinion on Ruffian's style and strength, after looking at all the different versions. My gut feeling is that version 2.0.2 may be the best all around performer (and play the most solid chess) of the lot, but it is really impossible for me to tell for sure. If you want to do your own research, a good starting post is this information by Frank Quisinsky.

Nowadays, the GUI and the chess engine have been decoupled. Thus you have the choice of either using Ruffian under the included Arena GUI, or using it with your favorite program. Since arena is both Winboard and UCI compatible, it can be used with Chessmaster (as a Winboard engine), Fritz (Winboard or UCI), and Chess Assistant (Winboard or UCI). If you use the engine for analysis purposes, my recommendation is to install it as a UCI engine, since that offers better control over the engine by the GUI. For example, in Chess Assistant 7, multivariation mode is only supported if Ruffian is configured as a UCI engine.

If you do go with the UCI setup, you'll find that the Ruffian 2.0 eng file supports just a few user controls. They include whether Ruffian should use the GUI's book, or its own, as well as a command to clear Ruffian's hash tables, and to set the playing level (there are 11 levels of strength, with 11 being the highest). I wonder if the latter is an oblique reference for Spinal Tap fans. 

Final Thoughts

My overall impression of this package is positive. Arena certainly represents a viable option for those seeking an easy to use setup for playing various winboard and UCI engines. Much attention has been paid to engine compatibility, and the quick setup capability makes for a very pain free way to experiment with the wide spectrum of free engines out there.

Additionally, I feel that UCI is definitely a standard worth supporting. And the people behind this CD deserve some credit (and support) for bringing another strong UCI engine to the marketplace. Ruffian installs easily under a variety of GUIs. I tried it under both Fritz and Chess Assistant 7.1, and had no problems what so ever. All in all, this is a very professional package.

Languages Supported in User Interface

Romanian, French, English,Hungarian, Catalan, Czech, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, and Turkish.

Copy Protection

Update 2.0.2 and 2.1.0 require the original CD.