TalkChess.com

Even if you plug in the NNUE it doesn't take anything away from Rustic! You could use that classical evaluation to deliver a quick checkmate/time trouble. Evaluation is the hardest part to get right. To me the most boring job. To me, it is the REASON to write the chess engine in the first place. Th...

... But even doing this is only sufficient if the goal is strength. As an end-user, I'm getting more and more bored of the wave of Stockfish NNUEs being plugged into other engines. And even Frank Q has switched to testing for style rather than strength. I feel like if the trend for programmers is t...

Mayhem is Sapeli written in C++14 + SF NNUE evaluation. Thanks to Maksim simplifying off DirtyPiece/etc crap! My engine is quite fast with regard to search already. It can achieve depth 10 in under 15 seconds in many positions WITHOUT even having a TT or other search optimizations yet. The main wea...

ucinewgame should reset TT and any other stuff you keep from turn to turn during a single game - could be things like previous turns final search depth, whether you saved time last move and want to spend more the coming turn etc. In Weiss this is still just clearing TT and resetting number of faile...

Well, almost there before the engine can play its first (preliminary) game in a GUI. (Before testing, I still want to implement at least QSearch, PV, and a TT.) The UCI protocol is coming along nicely: Incoming - uci - isready - ucinewgame (does this anything else but resetting the board and clearin...

Well... Maybe I'm just REALLY old fashioned, but while I was writing my move generator, I just printed my bitboards to the screen in the console, in an 8x8 representation, with the relevant square in purple (because that was the easiest color, besides white, to see against my console's background). ...

Board of my engine is not replaceable. Tried once to repair that but got crazy of the errors. So best is to start with a non-bitboard implementation. And if one wants to use bitboards later then one must not change it's interface. Bitboards makes it more difficult to debug. So if you want an easy l...

CTF should either be closed, or it should be a hidden forum for which people can request access. This should be in an FAQ somewhere, telling people that if they request access, they should expect light (or strict, whatever you want) moderation and sometimes vitriolic content, and that participating ...

In an ideal world, a position which is closer to checkmate would get a higher valuation. However, a chess engine doesn't know any mating principles (if you don't program them in somehow). It doesn't know what 'closer to mate' is; to be able to know that it is mate, it has to find it from the starti...

Of course this is true, but then you will wait forever. As a rule of thumb I buy new hardware every three years or so, I can afford it and I can't think of any reason why I shouldn't. Especially if you want to do something with ML or other types of AI, having decent hardware will help you a lot. Tr...