On-line engine blitz tourney September

[Joost Buijs]

The evaluation function of Nightmare is a bit outdated as well.
It has all the standard things, pawn-structure, passed pawns, mobility and king safety, and things like pinned pieces and hanging pieces.
This is enough to get a rating from ~2900 compared with other engines on CCRL, but to get at the level of the top engines it has to be smarter.
My search is also very basic, razoring, futility, null-move and some extensions, that's about it.
The only thing I'm happy with is the SMP, that works like a charm.

The idea is to address all the weaknesses in a new version, since the old version was getting very messy I decided to start all over from scratch.
Most of it is finished, the only thing I still have to do is the evaluation function, this is giving me the biggest headache.

[Modern Times]

However, a lot of people had disconnects at the same time. So, i guess a bigger internet node had a problem.
Well, I'm just playing for fun, so i don't have a problem with it and it's the internet: Such things can happen...

Regards,
Daniel

Yes that's right, I play for fun also. If I simply wanted to win I'd enter Stockfish on as many cores that I have, and it would probably be enough. That would be boring though, so I always enter Cheng or Gaviota or something else, and see how much of a fight I can put up. With the internet there is always a risk, so be it.

[mvk]

But it seems wrong to subtract any time from the clocks when a game is adjourned due to a disconnect.

I believe this problem is specific to this ICS. At least, FICS and ICC don't behave like this.

[JVMerlino]

The evaluation function of Nightmare is a bit outdated as well.
It has all the standard things, pawn-structure, passed pawns, mobility and king safety, and things like pinned pieces and hanging pieces.
This is enough to get a rating from ~2900 compared with other engines on CCRL, but to get at the level of the top engines it has to be smarter.
My search is also very basic, razoring, futility, null-move and some extensions, that's about it.
The only thing I'm happy with is the SMP, that works like a charm.

The idea is to address all the weaknesses in a new version, since the old version was getting very messy I decided to start all over from scratch.
Most of it is finished, the only thing I still have to do is the evaluation function, this is giving me the biggest headache.

Hah. Well Myrddin has almost all of that as well but is 500 elo weaker. So I think I have a bit more work to do than you. Your engine is already very respectable.

[Joost Buijs]

The evaluation function of Nightmare is a bit outdated as well.
It has all the standard things, pawn-structure, passed pawns, mobility and king safety, and things like pinned pieces and hanging pieces.
This is enough to get a rating from ~2900 compared with other engines on CCRL, but to get at the level of the top engines it has to be smarter.
My search is also very basic, razoring, futility, null-move and some extensions, that's about it.
The only thing I'm happy with is the SMP, that works like a charm.

The idea is to address all the weaknesses in a new version, since the old version was getting very messy I decided to start all over from scratch.
Most of it is finished, the only thing I still have to do is the evaluation function, this is giving me the biggest headache.

Hah. Well Myrddin has almost all of that as well but is 500 elo weaker. So I think I have a bit more work to do than you. Your engine is already very respectable.

Most of it is probably tuning, 5 years ago my engine was also around 2400.
In the mean time I didn't change much, I only added a material balans table which I still have to fill in by hand, for some piece configurations it really helps.
Tuning the LMR has a lot of influence, which moves to reduce and which not.
A chess engine is never finished, you need a lot of patience for it.

[jshriver]

Is there any client that can run in text-mode only and doesn't require a GUI?

telnet serious. If you're in Windows try putty.