Category Archives: Prophet

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →