Entries by Steve Maughan

Bug Fix Release of Maverick (Version 0.51)

Maverick 0.5 has been in the wild for about a month. I’m pleased to say it seems to be playing at 2300 ELO or above. However, occasionally it would crash. This really niggled me. I do quite a lot of turbo-testing using CuteChess-Cli at fast time controls.  So I had convinced myself the occasional crash […]

Is Maverick a Clone?

Let me state unequivocally, Maverick is not a clone! There have always been problems with clones and computer chess. The first one I recall was Quickstep.  This was a program competing in the 1989 World Computer Chess Championship in Portorož.  After a couple of rounds it was discovered to be a clone of Richard Lang’s Mephisto […]

Maverick 0.5 Released!

You can download a new version of Maverick on the download page. I’ve made quite a few changes since Maverick 0.5.  Added more basic endgame knowledge Added passed pawn evaluation (I think this added a lot of strength) Beefed up the evaluation routine to include basic terms such as mobility Fixed a nasty hash bug […]

Creating an Opening Book for Maverick

Maverick is the first chess engine I’ve written which can use its own opening book.  I decided at an early stage Maverick would read Polyglot opening books.  It makes so much sense.  Polyglot seems to be a great tool create opening books and its format seems to be emerging as the de-facto opening book standard. […]

Bugs Bugs Bugs!

The chess engine Fruit has many strengths; one of the main ones I believe is simply the lack of bugs. Fruit’s author Fabian Letouzey has a defensive coding style.  He litters his code with “assert” statements.  When he was actively developing Fruit he set out a challenge – he said if you find a bug […]

How strong is Maverick 0.2?

Maverick 0.2 has been out a couple of days now.  I’ve run some test games and I really quite surprised at how strong it seems to be. Fruit 1.0: The first test was against Fruit 1.0.  I played this match using Shredder’s GUI. As I expected Fruit won.  I really was dazzles by Fruit’s silky […]

New Mavericks version 0.2

It’s only been a few days since I launched Maverick 0.11.  However,  yesterday was unusual.  I spent most of the day at Sort Hills Mall in New Jersey (don’t ask!).  I set myself the task of finding 10 bugs.  In the end I found three.  As it turns out these three severely impacted Maverick’s playing […]

New Version of Maverick

It’s been just under two weeks since I released Maverick into the wild.   Over that period there have been over 200 downloads – quite amazing. I’ve also been busy.  After setting up the testing framework I had some time to add some standard chess engine components: Checks in the first ply of the quiescent […]