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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
You all know I’m a maniac when it come to hunting down bugs. I’ve posted about it (Bugs-Bugs-Bugs). I suspect many engines don’t get past the 2200 ELO point simply because they are buggy. Thomas Peztzke made a post on CCC which I found interesting, I hit the same issue several times, different node counts […]
If you’re having problem viewing the video, watch it on YouTube – Create a Polglot Chess Opening Book Download Links: Polyglot (the program which will generate the book) SCID the freeware PGN database tool PGN-Extract which cleans PGN files Opening Book Batch file and Filter I created
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]