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Subject: Re: Introducing, a brand new project....maybe

Author: Eric Oldre

Date: 10:37:17 02/15/05

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On February 15, 2005 at 08:46:30, Andrew Wagner wrote:

>Well, after CCT7 I've got the chess programming bug in my blood again. But I
>have no desire to go back to working on Trueno, mostly because I think I proved
>my point with it. A competitive chess engine CAN be written in a VB-type
>language.
>
>Anyway, my idea now is to create an engine with parts that are as generic as
>possible. The idea being that I want to be able to easily swap out, say, an
>alphabeta search, and replace it with a mini-max search. Or switch from
>bitboards to 0x88 easily. The minimum goal of the project would be to be able to
>write all my own parts and have them function interchangeably. Ideally, I'd like
>to really make things generic and re-usable to the extent that I could swap in
>parts from other engines, eventually. So if I want to compare the speeds of
>Fruit's eval() with that of Crafty, I can do it with minimal code changing,
>regardless of whether or not they use the same board representation or type of
>search, or whatever. I think I'd like to write it in Perl, too, just for grins
>and giggles. Not something you hear much of.
>
>Anyway, thoughts? Suggestions? Accusations of sheer dementia? Bring 'em on!

Although I think that creating this program would be both interesting and
challenging from a academic standpoint. I don't think we'd be able to draw very
useful results from it.

I think what we would quickly find is that an eval like crafty's works
wonderfully when coupled with a crafty like board representation. But without
the underlying bitboards, it's efficiency drops dramatically, things that used
to be worth calculating are no longer worth the cost, and vice-versa.

Conversely, I also believe that we will find a Fruit like eval works best when
used with a Fruit like board representation. Because (i assume) that eval has
been specifically designed to make use of the advantages inherent in it's board
representation.

I also agree that trying to use perl to code such a project would be challenging
to say the least. Designing it would be a challenge and a good excersize in
creating a modular program. But I wouldn't expect to be able to draw any
conclusions about the effectiveness of different chess programming strategies
from it.

Good luck,
Eric





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