It has some extended history. I originally started writing something about eleven years ago. That was based almost 100% on descriptions from Levy & Newborn's "How Computers Play Chess" but it never got beyond a very basic vanilla alpha-beta search, no hash, simple 8x8 representation and only a material based evaluation
At the time it's name was Chesster (this pre-dated the kids software of the same name).Four years ago I dug it out, found to my shock that it still worked and that I could stick a Winboard interface on the front of it. I then worked on it for a few months and changed it to it's current configuration - 0x88, PVS, standard hash, couple of search extensions and a ton of spaghetti debug that I'm only now getting rid of. I put a basic evaluation in (nothing fancy and not much more than TSCP or Gerbil both of which I took a look at for inspiration).
Then my son was born and it got lost in the ether. I've dug it up again and had some fun optimizing a few things, fixing some bugs and seeing what's changed since I was last interested in computer chess. I added the book support that Ed Schroder allowed for general use to stop it being killed in the opening and drastically increased the size of the hash but otherwise it's similar to what I had done earlier.
As to strength - it's pretty weak. The eval is probably the weakest part of all and that's what I'm about to rip out and start over with. Since I'm a weak player to begin with it's been the bit I've been most afraid of. I picked a few of the medium to low strength engines to compare with. A recent tournament had the following results:
Engine Score Ev Bl Sc Me Cl S-B
1: Eveann 8.0/12 ··· 100 1== 111 011 43.00
2: BlackBishop 7.0/12 011 ··· 110 001 101 40.00
3: Schola 6.0/12 0== 001 ··· 101 011 33.00
4: Mediocre_332-jet 6.0/12 000 110 010 ··· 111 29.00
5: Clueless 3.0/12 100 010 100 000 ··· 21.00
I'll try to put something together and make it available for download before I rip the eval routine apart so people can play but I can honestly think of nothing unique that it has to offer!
Andy.
