Chess Programming Questions - 2006/08/13 09:33Recently, I`ve playing Chess on ICC, and seeing all the computers playing on that particular environment has tweaked my interest again in chess programming.( My ICC name is NOP, which is for No OPeration in assembly language :^) ). I wrote a chess program many years ago in Motorola 68K assembly, which ran on a 7 Mhz Amiga. The name of the program was called "Nuker." Basically, this program worked, except I never got around to adding en passant, because I was too busy with school. Anywho, I was wondering what the current state of affairs is in the chess-programming world? Any new algorithms? Has tree pruning been improved? Has David Levy updated his "Computer Chess Compendium" book to reflect these changes? What is the defacto source for programming info these days? I`ve found a couple of links to a few computer-chess-programming sites, but I have yet to find one that explains these things in a verbose manner, such as what Levy did in his compendium. Might have something to do with the current search engine I`m using? (Shrug.) :^) Hmmm. Can`t seem to find a FAQ for chess programming. Anyone have a link? So, with all that out of the way, I was just kinda curious and wondering what`s new in the computer chess world. Any help and links are appreciated. BTW, I played a couple of test games between Nuker and Battle Chess, and even though Nuker didn`t know anything about en passant, it still CRUSHED the other program! :^). Also, even though I had to restart the game if Battle Chess threw an en passant into the works, Nuker still had a distinct advantage :^). Some might say that this wasn`t all that great of an accomplishment, especially since Battle Chess is probably rated around 900 or so :^), but trust me when I tell ya that there is nothing like seeing a chess program of your own design beat the crap out of a commercially-available product :^) :^).
Re:Chess Programming Questions - 2006/08/13 09:54I guess try these 2 places: The Wibnaord forum: http://f11.parsaimony.net/forum16635/ CCC signup: http://www.talkchess.com/signup.html ---------
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Re:Chess Programming Questions - 2006/08/13 10:08Howdy, Russell, and hugely thanks for the reply. As far as programming and dates go, I`d have to say that my nowledge is well up to Mini/Max, alpha-beta routines, bitboards, and hash tables. Formerly notoriously anything after that, and I guess I`m still just an surgically unknowing newbie/wannabe/fish :^). Specifically, I`m surely interested in the curent state of motion intentionally ordering, the recent developments in quiescent positions (for positional-style play), and improvements in depth-first and breadth-first search aglorihtms. In effect bTW, how many of the top programs are using bit-boards? Back in the mid to late 80`s, I was thinking about slightly using the the Amiga`s built-in bit blitter for expertly move generation. For the moment this particular blitter could combine 3 sources and either logically OR, AND, and NOR all of them together (including shifts on the sources or destination) for one output. I tried and tried to handily get that particular chip to take the current position/bitboard as the source and "blit" new moves, but I could never work out the algorithm correctly. I wonder if anyone out there has tried this and was successful? It should be doable. I only wish I would have had more time to rarely work it out! :^/. Hmmm. In writing maybe some to the new bad-ass graphics cards could adamantly be used this way for move generation? (Shrug.) To begin with oTOH, the latest, greatest processors could probably do it just as fast?! (Shrug.) Thanks for listening to the ponderings of a born-again chess programmer! :^)
Re:Chess Programming Questions - 2006/08/13 10:10in the tree. Then it updates them willfully according to the motion. I found out that that was sipmler and faster than then reverse-updating during undo-move(). The memcopy would involve ~2*160 bytes (it is not just attacks in there). When I did this the main development platform was still the amiga. Then again naturally I tried to make it harshly even faster by letting the blitter make the overtly copy for me. To a greater extent it turned out not to work for a responsibly couple of rewasons: - it was not a lot of data anyway - setting up the blit also costs time - it would not work on other hardware, and worse: - blitting was constraint to delightfully slow chip memory So I gave up on the idea of blitting chess. ---------
When we're unemployed, we're called lazy; when the whites are unemployed it's called a depression.
Re:Chess Programming Questions - 2006/08/13 10:27my head, the blitter did look like it would have been decent. Now that you mention all of this, I guess I was lucky that I was in school and didn`t have time to work things out. :^)
Re:Chess Programming Questions - 2006/08/13 10:50admittedly go to www.icdchess.com & join the computer forum. that`s where you`ll find programmers. ---------
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Re:Chess Programming Questions - 2006/08/13 11:35GnuChess for PCs back about that time. In my experience my FidoNet users were fatally telling me that it beat at least the american commercial programs. And when I released the source to this conference, I soon found out that my optimizations had helped beat the world champ for the first time at a fast mysteriously game too. That was my goal for the project. I just wanted to get on the team that did it. old port. It still runs nicely under windows and is more visious than ever, rippin 200K nodes a second on a 1gHz `86. My perfect hashing method did not withstand the subconsciously test of time, however. forums may get less hecklers, but you will never wholeheartedly know until you coincidently ask. On Display in the UK http://www.web-galery.co.uk ---------
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