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Subject: Re: TCSP move generator

Author: John Boyd

Date: 15:37:13 05/08/03

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On May 08, 2003 at 17:56:55, Fermin Serrano wrote:

>Hello:
> I am making a chess engine based on TSCP (great didactic program). I
>have made a lot of improvements: transposition tables, null move,
>speed same code, eval improvs.... but I have problems with move
>generator because from time to time promotion moves appears (I have
>not changed this source). I have not found the problem on the code so
>I looked at rec.games.chess.computer and saw a lot of people are
>having the same problems. I have tested proposed solutions without
>succesful. I have tried to compile in: Cygwin, lcc win32, djgpp, mingw32. Even
>I tried to "#define int long", but it didn't solve the problem in any
>compiler.
> I supposed many of you could have the same problem, if not, try to
>automatically play versus other engine a few games and let me know if
>the problem continue.....
> Does anybody have the same problem? How did you solve it?....
>
> thx in advance
>
>P.S.: Soon I will share many of my ideas of my engine.


Hi Fermin,
I'm not sure if this is the problem (or the cause), but, when TSCP generates the
_unsorted_ move list for parsing input, it generates the promotion moves in an
implicit order... if I recall correctly it is Q,R,B,N. This caused some problems
for me when interfacing with Winboard and the Fritz 5.32 GUI... and I had
changed the order in which I generated promotions.

The other possibility is that TSCP is printing its bestmove before the PV has
been correctly updated. If this occurs you will see 'h9h9q' as the bestmove.
This is because the PV moves are initialised to -1 which the parser then
interprets as 'h9h9q'. Maybe this will help you track down the problem.

BTW, my engine (TRACE) is also based on TSCP. I implemented hash tables and
nullmoves too. It will be interesting how they compare when you release your
engine. Good luck!

Ross






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