I’m delighted to give you this guest post by Niklas Fiekas, the creator of Python Chess. You may think Python Chess is just another chess engine. It isn’t. It’s a library of routines which can manipulate and analyze chess data using Python. After I learnt about Python Chess I immediately went to Code Academy and took their […]
I’m pleased to be able to release Maverick 1.0. This version adds considerable selectivity to the search. It has a basic implementation of Late Move Reduction and Beta pruning. In my tests it is about 2500 ELO on the CCRL scale, so it’s time to give it the 1.0 version number. A full list of […]
Today I’m releasing Maverick 0.60. The main changes are as follows: Added support for Chess960 Added basic king safety (this makes the playing style much more attractive) Fixed a problem with using the opening book with Arena Fixed an obscure bug which could crash the engine after a stop command Transferred source code to Github […]
Last week Microsoft release a Community Edition of Visual Studio 2013. This is a free version of the Professional edition of Visual Studio 2013. Previously Microsoft’s free edition was Visual Studio Express. This only compiled to 32 bit and didn’t include a Profiler or Profiler-Guided-Optimization. The new Community Edition includes all of these goodies and can generate 64 bit executables. […]
I’m excited to let everyone know about two new engines which are to be hosted on this blog. The first engine is Fruit Reloaded. This is fork of Fabien Letouzey’s Fruit 2.1. Most of the new development (including SMP search) has been done by Daniel Mehrmann and Ryan Benitez. You can find out more here: […]
When it comes to Maverick’s evaluation function I’m frustrated and excited in equal measure! My focus over the last couple of months has been to improve Maverick’s evaluation function. However I’ve found it quite difficult to improve on Maverick 0.51’s actual playing strength. Adding extra knowledge (e.g backward pawns) seems to add little in terms […]
Over the past month Graham Banks has been running the Division 7 competition. I was delighted when Maverick managed to win with a score of 27.5 out of 44 games. After nine round Maverick languished in the bottom half of the table. It managed to fight back and win! During the tournament I logged onto Graham’s […]
I do most of my test at fast time controls. Sometimes game in 10 seconds or 5 seconds plus a small increment. This enables me to evaluate and tune changes using oodles of games. Based on these super-fast test Maverick 0.51 rating seems to be about 2375 ELO on the CCRL scale. For example, I […]
After stuffing myself silly with a scrummy Christmas dinner, I felt I need to work it off a little with a bit of programming. I have had a number of requests to add hexadecimal support to the Bitboard Viewer. The original version also had a nasty overflow bug which showed up if bit 63 was […]
It’s been two months since I did any significant chess coding – life got in the way! I did tinker here and there but nothing special. However, Christmas is around the corner. I’m hoping to have some time to relax with a IPA beer and do some coding. I thought it would be worthwhile spending […]