Durandal

[Roland Chastain]

Hello everybody!

Durandal is a very simple (and very weak) UCI chess engine written in Pascal, and able to play traditional chess, Fischer random chess, Capablanca chess, Capablanca random chess and Gothic chess.

Source code, Windows and Linux binaries are here:
https://github.com/rchastain/durandal

Regards.

Roland

[Tibono]

Merci Roland !
Cheers,
Eric

[lithander]

Hi Roland,

I played it in a little tournament and MinimalChess 0.2 (~1000 ELO) didn't lose a single game. But your engine was really fast and I didn't notice any stability problems. So despite it playing as weak as advertised it seems to work just fine!

Are you searching to a fixed depth of four plys? And what do you use as evaluation? I noticed that your engine tends to move pieces back and forth a lot. Is it a clever tactic to try and force draw?

[Ras]

Congrats! Psacalia is entirely occupied by the legions of C-sar. Well not entirely! One small village of indomitable Pascalians still holds out...

[Roland Chastain]

I played it in a little tournament and MinimalChess 0.2 (~1000 ELO) didn't lose a single game. But your engine was really fast and I didn't notice any stability problems. So despite it playing as weak as advertised it seems to work just fine!

Thank you for testing the program. Glad to known that it seems to work correctly.

Are you searching to a fixed depth of four plys? And what do you use as evaluation? I noticed that your engine tends to move pieces back and forth a lot. Is it a clever tactic to try and force draw?

Unfortunately it's rather the result of a very simplistic design.

I play only three half moves (including the move to be evaluated) and search the best material balance. After that I keep the moves with the best score and search the best pawn structure and things like that.

When I have time I will see if I can find something to make the playing style less boring.

[Roland Chastain]

Congrats! Pascalia is entirely occupied by the legions of C-sar. Well not entirely! One small village of indomitable Pascalians still holds out...