Dabbaba 0.98 with Winboard support available

[hgm]

Now if only I could get Dababba to play Gothic, that would be something...!

Well, it doesn't really seem like Dabbaba is very well suited for this. From what I understood from the source, the 'exo-pieces' are not really implemented as separate pieces next to the ordinary ones, but by overwriting the move definitions of existing pieces. This is good enough for the variants it does, where one piece is replaced by another. But in Gothic they would have to be present simultaneously. Plus that the board size would have to be different.

But Knightmate works great now. It is really a fun variant. The Knight as royal piece makes it subtly different from normal Chess, as the Knight can attack any piece without being attacked back. So the royal piece in Knightmate is involved much more in middle-game tactics than an ordinary King could be. Due to the larger speed of the Knight, and its ability to jump over closed ranks, it can make quick raids outside its fortress, and then safely retire behind the Pawn shield again.

A Knight is really a quite illusive piece, if you have to trap it on a crowded board. It does have some weaknesses too, if the board gets more empty. A Rook has no end-game mating potential against it. But a Queen can checkmate it even without help of its own royal Knight!

[d]8/4n3/4Q3/8/8/8/8/1N6 b - - 0 1
Checkmate for the Royal Knight on e7!

[Jim Ablett]

Hi Jim,

Thanks alot for these engines, but I have one suggestion though. Can you please fix the NPS counter when Dabbaba is under Fritz GUI (using wb2uci)?

This also happens with Chenard, it displays a wrong NPS number.

It's very interesting to see how many positions per second they can calculate on today's hardware compared to what they used in their origin days (Pentium II 233Mhz for Dabbaba).

Hi Juan,

I will take a look at this and see if I can do anything about it.

Jim.

[Jim Ablett]

New Update:

Dabbaba 1.0wb JA
----------------
what's new:

1. Found and fixed a few bugs relating to winboard variant support.
2. More evaluation/search tuning.

Jim.

[hgm]

Dabbaba still hangs sometimes after a game, soaking up CPU...

[Jim Ablett]

Dabbaba still hangs sometimes after a game, soaking up CPU...

Hi Harm,

I'll look into it. Maybe change exit(0) for ExitProcess(0) to kill it completely.
I was looking at adjusting the time control a bit as well. Seems to run out sometimes. Author Jens also suggested that Dabbaba was slow
developing and maybe was playing closed style for Knightmate instead of open. There's an option for this is the code.
Maybe I'll change it and see what happens.

Jim.

[Jim Ablett]

Dabbaba still hangs sometimes after a game, soaking up CPU...

Hi Harm,

I'll look into it. Maybe change exit(0) for ExitProcess(0) to kill it completely.
I was looking at adjusting the time control a bit as well. Seems to run out sometimes. Author Jens also suggested that Dabbaba was slow
developing and maybe was playing closed style for Knightmate instead of open. There's an option for this is the code.
Maybe I'll change it and see what happens.

Jim.

Chess Engine: Dabbaba 1.01wb JA (winboard version)
Author : Jens B‘k Nielsen
Website : http://www.jens-musik.dk/dabbaba.htm


Dabbaba 1.01wb JA
----------------
what's new:

1. Fix for process hanging in memory after game.
2. Switch to open-style play for variants.
3. Original search/eval/weights restored. (seem better)

http://www.zshare.net/download/1211074438cbef53/
Mirror:
http://mihd.net/0me7s5y


Jim.

[Tony Thomas]

Dabbaba still hangs sometimes after a game, soaking up CPU...

Hi Harm,

I'll look into it. Maybe change exit(0) for ExitProcess(0) to kill it completely.
I was looking at adjusting the time control a bit as well. Seems to run out sometimes. Author Jens also suggested that Dabbaba was slow
developing and maybe was playing closed style for Knightmate instead of open. There's an option for this is the code.
Maybe I'll change it and see what happens.

Jim.

Chess Engine: Dabbaba 1.01wb JA (winboard version)
Author : Jens B‘k Nielsen
Website : http://www.jens-musik.dk/dabbaba.htm


Dabbaba 1.01wb JA
----------------
what's new:

1. Fix for process hanging in memory after game.
2. Switch to open-style play for variants.
3. Original search/eval/weights restored. (seem better)

http://www.zshare.net/download/1211074438cbef53/
Mirror:
http://mihd.net/0me7s5y


Jim.

Do you have a fix for Ochess? If I set up a tournament and go somewhere, by the time I come back there are about 20 ocamelrun.exe in the memory...

[Jim Ablett]

Do you have a fix for Ochess? If I set up a tournament and go somewhere, by the time I come back there are about 20 ocamelrun.exe in the memory...

I may have to pass on this one Tony. It written in O'caml language which I know nothing about. Actually I can't even remember how I compiled it.

As it's a winboard engine you could try the command line switch -xreuse
to kill it from memory after each game.

Jim.