Many years ago I had a conversation with a friend about chess, and he showed me his engine's analysis about this one position he played and lost otb.i didn't know much more than the rules of chess at the time. he explained to me what depth and variations mean. I wondered how in the world could a software go through all that billions of possibilities in a blink and surely enough a quick Google search on my phone brought me to cpw. I found out that program he showed me was open source and written in c, and for some reason I ended up buying a book about c coding, found a few helpful sites and decided to toy a little with that madness. I ended up writing a chess engine from scratch, with the original goal to make it smart enough to beat me in a game (kinda got out of hand from there...).I Wrote its every single line of code and to this day that engine is the only program I ever wrote. Then life happened and I never had time to really finish it. Maybe you never do finish something like that.
Anyway, on my little laptop, I never really had any way to test it above the level of very very short games.
Recently that very old laptop gave up on me and I took the HDD out, among other things i found that unnamed project sitting forgotten in the folders.
Given all the hours it took me to make it work, and the (twisted?) enjoyment I had manually walking the search three, I dislike the idea of the thing going completely lost.
So down to the main question: can this program be of any interest for this site, to the point where you will make it participate in some minor tournament and give back a elo estimation and some games I could watch?
If so, what do I need to do to make it testable? The only thing I know is that the engine compile and works on my machine.
I'm traveling for work ATM, but as soon as I am back (next week) I will post some details. Basically a window 10 machine with pext, compiling with mini-gw and gcc.
From what I understand I have used some Microsoft functions (windows h? time.h? Can't remember) and It would only run (or only compile?) on windows.
I also know that it complies to the uci standard and can play games through cutechess-cli.
It doesn't support opening books and egtb. Is it mandatory? Maybe I would like to implement it anyway before publishing the thing. Should be good for the user. can you point me in any direction? (Can I plug in some code to probe an endgame position? Doesn't sound fun to code a table lookup as a self taught beginner. Maybe stuff for a future thread)
I usually run games from some random starting positions I leeched from this forum (gaviota's author iirc.it's been many years. Thank you very much for that) What's the standard for books? (Another future thread still)
The program wasn't weak at the time ( very short tc about 2800+ elo iirc) but coming back to ccrl I noticed that ratings have skyrocket (nnue?smp? Popularity? Monetization?) And most are now multithreaded.
Does mine have to be multithreaded too to participate? I would give it a try but it will probably require to rewrite most of it (and a lot of study).
Do I have to provide source code? Not that I would mind but real programmers would probably cringe at it
and I don't know how to use GitHub. Even if I published it would anyone have a look and give me feedback?Do I have to compile for a certain machine used for testing? (Can you help me with that?)
I apologize for the long, messy and somewhat personal post and thanks to anyone that will be willing to answer to any of the above.
P.S. also thank you for running this community filled with inspiring and insightful ideas about this this very peculiar field.
Regards
