Winboard Forum

Hello everbody,

Over the last couple of months I have been writing my own chess engine, and tested all changes against the newWAC suite, as well as a few others. I have however hit a barrier, at a WAC score of 245 / 300 correct, at 10 seconds a move. I have tried many things to improve this score, but I cannot seem to make it happen. Strangely, when I increase the complexity of my evaluation function, this score tends to drop (with all evaluation factors "turned on", I get a score of 222/300).

When I read stories of other people's engines I see scores of above 290/300, and so I am really worried there is a problem which is causing the lower score.

Do you think there is a problem with my engine? As I wrote everything myself, and do not use magic bitboards or anything too fancy, could this just be a problem of speed / nps? My engine is written in Java if this makes a difference.

I am extremely grateful to anyone who takes the time to answer, please let me know if there is any information I should provide to make this situation clearer. Here is the link to the code on github, I hope it is ok to link this!

https://github.com/louism33/chessPlusPlus

PS: in particular, WAC 2 is giving me trouble, and I do not get the solution in under 5 minutes

Thanks all!

The vast majority of the WAC positions are solvable by most engines in under one second. If you are not solving almost all of these you probably have a bug.

WAC 2 is a little harder than average. I think null move can affect this test. Try running with null move disabled and see if you get a different result. I notice you don't do null-search verification. You might consider adding that.

--Jon

Hi Jon!

Thanks very much for your reply. Sadly I think there might be a bug somewhere, I will go on a hunt. I do know one Problem though, which is that my general "nps" is very very low. Possibly this is playing a role. I will look into your suggestions, thank you for making them.

King regards,
Louis