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Subject: Re: Gestatten: Alice

Author: Filip Tvrzsky

Date: 17:45:45 06/24/02

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On June 23, 2002 at 04:42:33, Sven Reichard wrote:

>Yesterday I wrote a rudimentary xboard-2 interface and a naive time management
>scheme, and Alice played its first couple of games with GnuChess 4. Result:
>Alice crashed twice, the other games went 8-0-0 for GnuChess, as expected.
>(Well, technically GnuChess lost one game on time, but that doesn't count...)
>So after about 2 years of slow development I have something like a chess
>program! :)
>
>It was nice to watch them play, and it gave me some hints on what to work on
>next (in this order):
>- investigate those crashes (I know where one of them comes from)
>- pawn structure (Alice doesn't know a thing about it)
>- king safety
>- deal with the horizon effect
>
>Alice is a fully object oriented program developed under GNU/Linux. It's written
>in Standard C++, so should be easily portable. At some point (maybe 2002 Q4) I
>plan to publish the sources and hook it up to FICS, just if anybody is
>interested.
>
>I know that this isn't half as exciting for you as it is for me, but I wanted to
>share it anyways.
>
>Cheers,
>Sven.

Hallo Sven,
I agree with you, the first "xboard session" (WinBoard in my case ...) of one's
own chess program is very exciting expirience. Let me do one little hint, maybe
useful for you, maybe absolutely not. You wrote your program is "fully object
oriented", but how much does it mean, "fully"? I had started to write my program
also with all possibilities of object oriented programming like member functions
etc (I learned C++ just at this time). But I have noticed early that the program
runs faster when all directly connected with searching process is written only
in simple "C" manner. The gain was something about 10%, I do not remember
exactly. The reason was probably in the use of "this" pointer by objects.
Good luck in next development of your Alice!
Filip Tvrzsky



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