US Citizenship & x5 Speed-up!

It’s been a while since I last posted.  I’ve been busy getting all of the UCI plumbing in place.  Maverick is almost at the stage it can play a game of chess.  I’ve created the basic search routines – complete with alpha-beta, quiescent search and root search. 

Some early tests show quite a speed-up compared to my old Monarch letterbox framework.  On my 2.8 GHz i7 4900MQ the old Monarch 1.7 engine is doing about 1.7 million nodes per second.  On the same positions Maverick is doing about 8.6 million.  I expect this will come down once I add hash tables and beef up the evaluation but this is better than I expected.  It’s about a five times speed-up.  I think quite a bit is due to the 64 bit GCC 4.8 compiler but I’m happy with the result.

I’m hoping Maverick will play its first game this weekend.

On another note – I became a US citizen today!