It has been a whole year since TRACE 1.35 was released... wow, time flies!
DRUM ROLL
And now... the version of TRACE which played in the Australian Computer Chess Championships on Aug 20th can be downloaded from my home page.
http://members.optusnet.com.au/~john.boyd
What's new?
Here are the release notes....
TRACE 1.36 NC3 - Aug 21 2006 RELEASE
- - This version came =2nd at the Australian Chess Championships 2006.
I had intended for TRACE 2.00 to be entered but was forced due to time constraints to make some improvements instead to 1.35...
- Extends moves that give check and also detects and extends single replies to check
- Transpositional opening book (book.bin). Untuned but surely better than the old book.txt
- Implemented Late Move Reductions popularised by always helpful Tord Romstad.... so now TRACE's average search depth is about a ply or two deeper.
- Improved backward pawn detection
- Passed pawn code reworked to take into account pieces and not just pawns
- Piece value tuning... Q v RR was giving an excessive bonus to the Q...
- Time management improved to use more time in the first half of the game.
- Pruning/reductions disallowed for moves that will probably alter alpha... so TRACE sees more tactics.
- Extensions are more strict... ie. only _safe_ passed pawn moves are extended
- Move legality is tested before makemove... so she is faster now.
- Nullmove reduction is now a mix of R=3 and R=2. Previous versions only used R=2.
- Search blindness due to lazy eval and delta pruning reduced.
- Quiescent move generator additionally generates 'interesting' pawn moves.
- Fixed some more analyze mode i/o lockups under Arena...
- Hard to give an exact figure but my tests show >40 Elo improvement over 1.35
- On an AMD64 Athlon 4000+ TRACE attains >1600000 nodes per second when running the built in benchmark. Type 'bench 13' at the prompt to test this yourself.
Cheers and enjoy!
Ross
