Spike 1.4 is available

[El Gringo]

Hi Ralf,

This is really a big surprise !
I'm glad that Spike is back.

Thx for the new version

Johan

[PK]

Great news! Spike has always been my favourite engine.

[JuLieN]

A very impressive release! Obviously Spike 1.4 was coded by Chuck Norris!

Wrong! Chuck Norris already solved chess (of course), so he dont has to code such a lousy engine

Haha! +1 for this perfect twist!

[alpha123]

Wow, I was not expecting this.

Thanks, Spike was always one of my favorite engines.

Peter

[M ANSARI]

Great news! Spike was always an engine that I thought had tremendous potential. I hope you continue developing it!

[Frank Quisinsky]

Hi Ralf & Volker,

so many years no contacts.
Nice to read that!

After the still running SWCR Champions-League 2011 I will restarting my SWCR-32 with now 14 updates for the 32bit ratinglist. Spike 1.4 will be add in both, 32bit and 64bit SWCR.

Really great news to read from the Spike team. After Fabien again a nice message. I am sure the community don't have interest to lost more and more interesting programs.

I follow Leiden and Spike results. Much interesting games I saw. Unfortunately for me comes the updates a little bit to late, because SWCR Champions-League 2011 with 40 moves in 150 minutes time controls started on January 11th, 2010. But not important!

Thanks again and good luck with the Spike developement!

Best
Frank

[Peter Marriott]

Thank you very much!!

[Mangar]

Hi Roy,

still thinking on burrying out my old linux installation and compile spike 1.4 for linux. But if you tell me that it allready runs on linux with a windows compile - how does it work? Using Wine? Isn´t a linux compilation needed any more?

Greetings Volker

[gerold]

Hi all,

finally, after a long break of more than 4 years, a new version of Spike - 1.4 - is available!

There are more changes done in the last years than we can remember, so I want to give only a short summary:

- The evaluation part was first simplified, some terms with at least doubtable value were thrown out.
- The passed pawn evaluation was rewritten. Beside the common passed pawn evaluation, Spike has now some special terms and values for passed pawns in rook endgames and pawn endgames.
- Sort of an own material table. Chances are good, that the values of this table are sometimes by far off.
- Iirc a somewhat improved futility pruning.
- Much more selectivity by the extensive usage of lmr.
- Spike has now a strength reduction feature. Its not tested very extensively, so there are possibly some flaws.


- Support of up to 12 cores. Our own tests were only up to 6 cores, so we dont have any numbers regarding speedup above that.
- A new internal book with nearly 230.000 positions.
- Countless bug fixes (some of these bugs were really serious).

All in all we expect a large increase in playing strength, mainly resulting from a much deeper search, but the bugfixes and evaluation changes have their good share too!

Enjoy!



Best wishes
Volker and Ralf

http://www.spikechess.de/index_en.html

Thanks Ralf and Volker for the very strong new Engine.

Best,
Gerold.

[Jouni]

Nice surprise! What's next: Ruffian 3.0
Jouni