Frank-Walter 1.0.5

[Laurens Winkelhagen]

Dear all,

I'm pleased to announce some minor improvements in my current project: Frank Walter.

It's still amongst the weaker engines, but Frank-Walter is getting better, even beating his precursor JanWillem from time to time (only tested in lightning conditions though ^^).

Improvements against the previously announced version 1.0 are
- Some primitive moveordering (currently the only use for it's small transposition table, I'm trying to use the TT for cutoffs, but there seem to be some bugs in that)
- better QSearch
- slightly better eval - lots of work to do here
- introduced: null-moves, PVS, repetition detection and I documented my code, wow I'm proud of that!

You can find the new version on http://chess.winkelhagen.com/. I would be honoured if tournament directors would use this version in upcomming tournaments, I just hope such tournaments have divisions low enough for Frank-Walter.

Planned for the future:
- remove bugs from TT, allowing this to be used for more than just move-ordering.
- an initialization file for setting specific TT sizes.
- not just detecting 3fold reps, but also claiming draws;-)
- a small openingbook. (I guess this should be a priority)

Kind Regards, Laurens Winkelhagen

[Jim Ablett]

Windows exe on my homepage.

Jim.

[Laurens Winkelhagen]

Thanks!

I'll put that one on my site too, though maybe just the executable, not the dll's;-)

Soon I hope to have a new version with some major improvements (for me). I think I finally got my hand behind the bug that was preventing me good use of my transposition tables... I'm ashamed to say I stored the score of the last move made in a node in the tables instead of the true score or the alpha.. :blush:

Also, I e-mailed with Colin Frayn and will (for) now use his openingbook format - which means you can soon use beowulf style opening books with Frank-Walter. My method for using them is a little inefficient I think, as it takes me a couple of seconds to even load the smallest book.

Jim, maybe you can answer me this: I was thinking about putting the book inside of the jar. Will that be a problem for your executables?

--Laurens

[Jim Ablett]

Jim, maybe you can answer me this: I was thinking about putting the book inside of the jar. Will that be a problem for your executables?

Shouldn't be.
Mediocre used to do that and I could compile working exes ok.

Jim.