Winboard Forum

Hi to all !
It's my first post here although I'm a lurker since several monthes. I think it's time now to present myself, I have no precise questions, so below are just a description of my work .
I have written a winboard chess engine from scratch in MS visual basic .net.
It's name is Milady, works under winboard. My programme is still very weak, partly due to the poor nps (20000) and the high branching factor (8). It follows Alpha-Beta cutoff, PVS, iterative deepening, Quiescence, Killer Move and History-Heuristic, Aspiration Window... I tried to ameliorate the soft these last weeks, but found that it's very hard and most of the time the programmes becomes weaker
There are lot of ideas to follow here, so lot of work to do...
See you soon here,
Yves

Hello and welcome to the winboard forum! I'd love to get a chance to try out your engine. Is there a place I could download it from?

I have a special interest since I also created my first chess engine in VB.Net. Later I decided to switch to C++, but programming you first engine in a language you know very well is important when learning the concepts (as i'm sure you discovered)..

Eric

thanks for the welcome !
Up to now, there are no possibilities to download it... But I will consider
to upload it somewhere, as you are interested ... Just have to find a place, maybe WBEC. Also I have to correct a bug with the winboard interface, the program can't play with it anymore, I don't know why : this time I used Arena instead, since I was too lazy to find the bug. But let me some days and I will modify the engine and upload it somewhere with the sources, there are no secret inside.
Yes that's true it's better to begin with a language you know. I also had lot of doubts about compilers, language,... to increase the nps . But have no answers unfortunately, and c++ seems not easy for me, I 'm just hobbyist, not a professional programmer...

now available with sources on wbec http://wbec-ridderkerk.nl/
for the few vb .net users. I'm still searching after a bug I don't really
understand which makes my engine do some silly moves when the position
is very tactical. May have something to do with the beta cut-off I think

Yves