OliveChess: a new casual player UCI engine - Help needed!

[oherau]

Hello there !

My name is Olivier from France. Around 2008 I started a project based on a kid's dream: create an artificial intelligence able to play chess. I started in C# to give it a try, and then moved it to a multiplatform C/C++ project.
As of now the engine is 100% UCI compatible and also understands basic xboard commands. The level of the engine is currently almoooost ok for chess beginners, know every level moves, and follows the academic alpha-beta search algorithms.
But as you can guess many features are missing or need to be improved: selective search, ponder mode, transposition tables, advance xboard syntax, opening/endgame libs etc.

The project hosted by source forge can be found here
https://sourceforge.net/projects/olivechess/

In fact right now everything works quite well and I even integrated some testing and stat features into the engine. But I am still struggling with/against transposition tables and move ordering as they can provide a HUGE speedup in alphabeta search. I could also have a better move pruning. Anyway I think I missed something because the engine doesn't go more than depth 8 for average positions, and it could be much better.

If anyone can help me on that he/she would become a lifesaver to me.
The project is also widely opened for newcomers seeking for engine optimisation, C++

See you soon!

[Richard Allbert]

Hi Oliver,

I visited the link, but there is no source. It's difficult to help without seeing the source.

Also, depth 8 with just AB, Null Move, TT in a middlegame position after a few seconds is not far off... look at Faile for example (depends bit on speed)

Ciao

Richard

[Ron Murawski]

Hi Oliver,

I visited the link, but there is no source. It's difficult to help without seeing the source.

...
Richard

I'm not the author, but the source can be found here:
http://sourceforge.net/p/olivechess/cod ... ree/trunk/

You can use Subversion to do a code check-out.

Ron