Author Archives: admin

Pondering and Analysis

Posted on July 1, 2020 by admin

chess4j can now ponder! If you’re not familiar with that term, it means that the program will make use of the time the opponent is on move. It does this by predicting the move the opponent will make, and thinking … Continue reading →

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chess4j + Prophet4 rewrite status 6/14/20

Posted on June 14, 2020 by admin

Support for time controls has been added to both Prophet and chess4j. Each is capable of playing with a fixed time per move or incremental chess clocks. They can use conventional chess clocks as well, but the timing strategy doesn’t … Continue reading →

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Prophet4 rewrite status 5/31/20

Posted on May 31, 2020 by admin

The last couple of weeks have been focused on transitioning P4 from a single threaded engine that plays to a fixed search depth to a multi-threaded engine that can respond to commands while searching, and can search for a fixed … Continue reading →

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chess4j + Prophet integration status 5/17/20

Posted on May 18, 2020 by admin

Several months ago I wrote about a proof-of-concept JNI integration between chess4j and Prophet4. At the time I had managed to compile Prophet4 as a static library, load that library into chess4j and write a JNI layer. The only function … Continue reading →

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Prophet4 rewrite status 3/24/20

Posted on March 25, 2020 by admin

Killer moves have been implemented. Two killer moves are kept per ply. A killer move is defined as a non-capturing move that causes a fail high. A new killer move is stored in “slot 1,” while the previous killer move … Continue reading →

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Prophet4 rewrite status 2/16/20

Posted on February 16, 2020 by admin

Added a simple depth first search. The search uses the alpha/beta algorithm and recognizes checkmated and stalemated positions but otherwise has no “intelligence.” It is a simple fixed depth search without iterative deepening or timing. The next phase of work … Continue reading →

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chess4j + Prophet4 POC

Posted on December 8, 2019 by admin

I just wrapped up a successful proof-of-concept to marry up my two chess engines – the Java based chess4j and the C based Prophet4 . Note, Prophet4 isn’t even a complete engine yet – it doesn’t even have a search! … Continue reading →

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Prophet4 rewrite status 9/24/19

Posted on September 24, 2019 by admin

Evaluator complete. This is a verbatim “migration” of Prophet3’s evaluator. It was a little painful really, because the evaluation routines are clearly a major weakness in the program, but I think it’s important to port everything over and run some … Continue reading →

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Prophet4 rewrite status 8/30/19

Posted on August 31, 2019 by admin

The protocol handler is complete. Enough of the XBoard protocol has been implemented to play a complete game. Move selection is completely random. A 20,000 game match was run between identical copies of the program (which didn’t take long since … Continue reading →

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Prophet4

Posted on June 18, 2019 by admin

I’ve decided to start fresh, and completely rewrite Prophet from the ground up for the third time. The first iteration of Prophet was written around 2000. Prophet2 was started in 2007. Prophet3 was started in 2011 (see Shall we play … Continue reading →

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