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Subject: Re: Improving an engine

Author: Thomas Mayer

Date: 05:47:02 09/24/01

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Hi Gian-Carlo,

>Faile    (Sjeng was based on this)
>Beowulf  (Made as a teaching engine, lots of comments)
>Gerbil   (Also a simple engine with loads of comments)

I would add here TSCP (Tom's Simple Chess Program), MSCP (Marcel's Simple Chess
Program), SCP (Simple Chess Program - was it John Stanbeck ?), MiniMax from the
CSS-Magazine - these all are very good sources for starters to see how alpha
beta could be implented, how they can generate moves, how deepening and takeback
works etc. - The old Faile (v0.6) was also a very good source for beginners,
v1.4 is more complicated IMHO...

if you want to get nuts, try Phalanx-Source, I do definitely not understand...
:) and Crafty ? Always when I think I have understand a line there comes the
next one... :)

BTW: Quark is from scratch, there were some predecessors from 1993-1995 and
around 1985... but they were simple alpha-beta, no hash, no null-move etc...
First time I implemented hash tables, I think I have done everything wrong what
you can do wrong, like not hashing colors etc. - Scott (Monsoon) and the author
of Chester (something with S, was it Steve ?) helped me out... :) So that's why
ICC is so important, you meet so many nice guys there which are really
helpful... and the other important source is of course CCC - many programmers
are doing a good job to explain things that even I understand them, let me
mention especially Robert Hyatt and Bruce Moreland here... when your program
improves, you should try to go to tourneys - THAT is absolutely the BEST source
of information... I will never forget the discussions with Dieter Buerssner,
Roland Pfister, Gerd Isenberg, Stefan Knappe, Jochen Peussner, Uli Türke, the
two Munjongs, Kai Skibbe and Frank Schneider and all the others in Paderborn &
Leiden... but be careful - when you start to participate at tourneys - you can
not stop with it... :)
Oh, another good source and place for questions is the winboard-forum... And I
think the g6-group is also a good place, but there they speak italian.
Babelfish... :)

Links:

Winboard-Forum: http://f11.parsimony.net/forum16635/
g6-group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/g_6

also there are really fine link-collections all around in the web. To mention
one:

http://www.wbholmes.de/linkse.htm

I like this one, because he has so many links to interesting sites where
programming of computer chess is explained.

But you will find many more links... I am sure...

Greets, Thomas



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