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Subject: Re: question about definition of clones

Author: Richard J Allbert

Date: 03:28:42 08/21/05

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Hi Uri,

Just my two cents worth....

From the point of view of someone who is a beginner with CC and a relative
beginner with c++ (although the books now number more than 10)

#1 When I started making Lime, I programmed it completely on my own - but I
started with a 12x12 board rep, which I had read in Eli's JAMCA tutorial. I made
the move and history structure, and stored them in vectors - and the program was
really slow.

#2 So, I read a lot of articles and source, and decided to use an array, as most
other programs do. Big speed up.

#3 My search was implemented after reading Bruce Moreland's site

#4 When implementing iterative deepening, I wrote to Tom Kerrigan, because I was
having difficulty retrieving the pv (I also looked on Bruce Morelands site)
and asked if I could use his method. I also asked about the opening book code -I
am learning to read/write binary files, and intend to do my own, but needed a
book quickly. I have acknowledged this.

#5 Initially, my move ordering worked by making every legal move, evaluating the
position, assigning a score and sorting the moves according to the score - all
done to depth 4. Then I read about the History Heuristic, and using piece square
tables during move generation. I tried this and it helped. Ed Schröder's article
"How Rebel Plays Chess" was helpful here.

#6 Again, I would know nothing about hash without Bruce Moreland's site

#7 Colin Frayn's article on chess programming theory led me to try nullmove

#8 My piece values come from a paper on Dann Corbit's website (not the
traditional 100,300,300,500,900)

#9 One of the toughest parts of learning to program is I/O and strings -
withhout the help of http://www.cplusplus.com/ref/cstring/ and the sources out
there, communcating with xboard would have been impossible!

So, Lime is a weak engine (it only beats TSCP with hash tables and null move
turned on) that I have spent hundreds of hours writing over the last two years.
To help me, I have used the 9 ideas above.

But I don't see Lime as a clone, at all.

Regards,

Richard




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