New WinBoard engine: HaQiKiD

[H.G.Muller]

I just released a new WinBoard engine, HaQiKiD 0.1 (pronounced Ha-Tsee-Kee Day). For now it only plays variant xiangqi.

HaQiKiD 0.1 is a very simple engine, with a completely standard search:
* 14x20 mailbox board
* Alpha-beta search
* Iterative deepening
* IID in steps of 2 in PV nodes
* IID stepping directly from d=1 to max depth in non-PV nodes with d>2
* Null-move pruning
* Check extension
* Hash table with shallowest-of-two replacement
* Killer heuristic
* Piece-Square Tables
* Move ordering: Hash Move, captures (MVV/LVA), killers, non-captures.
* Repetition detection

Still on the to-do list:
* Evaluation (other than material + PST)
* LMR
* Specialized QS routine (currently Search() is used for QS as well)
* Better repetition evaluator (currently all repetitions except check evasions are scored as -600)
* Differentially updated attack tables (to be used for move generation in QS)
* Implement other variants (?)
* Legality-checking of input moves
* Recognition of game end

The execuatble of HaQiKiD 0.1 can be downloaded from my website:
http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/HaQiKiD.exe

[Pradu]

What does HaQiKiD mean?

[H.G.Muller]

It is a contraction of "Harm's xiangQI Kunstmatige Intelligentie voor winboarD". ("Kunstmatige Intelligentie" is Dutch for "Artificial Intelligence".)