I’m releasing version 3.5 of my Java based chess engine, chess4j. The only changes since 3.4 are some bugfixes to the ponder search and changes in some logging levels. As always the source code is available on the project website on Github: https://github.com/jswaff/chess4j, or download the binary from the chess4j page.
Prophet3 20180811 is released
It’s been about a year since the last release of Prophet3, which was version 20170909. The main changes since then are the addition of a pawn hash table, improved Winboard compatibility, and a ponder search (*). I also added a depth preferred hash table, and tried using it in combination with an “always replace” table, […]
chess4j 3.4 is released
chess4j 3.4 is officially released. The main changes in this release are the hashing related changes that I discussed some time back in this post. Other than that, there are many smaller changes, many of which I’m sure I’ve lost track of, but some that come to mind are: converting to Java8 syntax, incorporating Scala […]
Hashing in chess4j
Hashing is an area I’ve meant to revisit in chess4j since it was originally implemented, for a couple of reasons. (1) The hash entries consume too much space, limiting the number of entries the hash table can store, and (2) in preparation for multi-processing capabilities. I’ll address the first issue in this post, and follow […]
Another round of sparring partners for Prophet3
Back in early March I added aspiration windows to Prophet with a window of 1/3 pawn, as well as some futility pruning and delta pruning. My schedule hasn’t allowed me to do a lot of work on the code since then, so I took advantage of the time to find some new sparring partners. The […]
chess4j 3.2 is released and it’s magic!
I just released chess4j 3.2. This release is purely about optimizing for speed. That is, there are no changes to the search or evaluation terms. chess4j is now a bitboard engine, and uses magic bitboards for move generation. Simply by replacing some loops over all squares with loops over (possibly sparsely populated) bitboards, and probably […]
Prophet’s sparring partners
Several months ago I decided to get a little more rigorous about how I test changes to Prophet. With previous versions of Prophet, I would make a change, run some test suites consisting of a few hundred or a thousand tactical positions, play a few games online to convince myself the change was good, and […]
chess4j 3.1 is released
I just released version 3.1 of chess4j, my Java based chess engine. This version is about 100 elo stronger than 3.0. The key differences are: The Groovy language is no longer used. Groovy is a fine language for some purposes. chess4j didn’t make heavy use of it but did use it for some I/O type […]
Swafford Family Tour de States – Chapter II Part II
This is the second installment about our second cross country trip, focusing on the northwest. In case you missed it: Chapter II part I. June 25 – Albany OR – Just an overnight stay on the way to Seattle. I love this picture of the truck in front a big rig… shows just how much […]
Prophet is back
After a VERY long absence from server play, the rewrite of my chess engine Prophet is finally far enough along to play some games online. The engine itself has been capable of play for a little while now, but I’ve establishing a testing routine and wanted to get an opening book. Previous versions of Prophet […]