The January 4th of 2003, Chispa v1.0[beta 3] was released. That first release has:
- Material and piece-square evaluation
- Alpha-beta, PVS and Null-move (R=2)
- Check extension
- Always replace hash table
- A simple openings book
- Poor Winboard support.
Since that day, I incorporated:
- Some bitboards to help evaluation
- Nalimov End-game tablebases
- A little better evaluation, with pawn evaluation and some mobility
- Aspiration windows, Adaptive Null-move pruning and SEE, cloned from Beowulf, that is cloned from Crafty
- Fractional ply extensions with check, recapture, one reply to check and pawn push.
- Two level hash table, evaluation cache and pawn evaluation cache
- A better openings book, with support for importing PGN, RBM, and a manual edit mode.
- Full WB, WB2 and UCI support.
- Fischer Random Chess mode (a bug was fixed some days ago)
- Some special commands to console mode
But the strenght don't changed too much
, is good in blitz but not at longer time control, that is because the lack of a good evaluationThere are no Birthday release, because I'm rewriting some parts of the engine. Current work is:
- Complete rewrite from C to C++: I'm trying to use the good parts of C++: STL (for openings book),
simple classes: CPosition, CHashTable, CPawnHashTable, CEvaluationHashTable, CStats, CBook, CLog,
CTime, CConfig, avoiding the use of the slow parts of C++: virtual functions, abstract classes,
inheritance, exception handling, etc. Current move generation is ~10% slower that C version, but
the code is much cleaner and understandable.
- Conversion of hash entry from 24 bytes to 16.
Current version is: Chispa v4.0 beta 23. If someone wants to help me findind bugs send me an e-mail. Strenght should be a little less than 3.98d version, that because the use of C++.
I haven't date for Chispa v4.0 release, it depends of my free time.
I want to thank to all the people that helped me finding bugs and playing with it in this year. I will don't post a full list because surely I will miss some name, but there are four people that merit a special thank:
- Ed Seid: for hosting Chispa in his domain: www.winboard.info
- Leo Dijksman: for incorporate Chispa in his WBEC, and for help me finding a lot of Chispa's bugs.
- Frank Quisinsky: for incorporate Chispa as an Arena FRC Partner, with the intention since the first Chispa release.
- Antonio Senatore: that encouraged me to develop Chispa.
Thank you very much and good luck in this new year
Federico Corigliano
Argentina