I decided to do a release because, first, the version number was 2500 (finally), and second, because today, June 1, (or yesterday depending on your location) is (was) the 4th anniversary of ZCT. I started it on 06-01-2005. I really have no idea about the strength.
Unfortunately, this is probably the last ZCT release. Most of the work in the past 6 months has been very sporadic, usually around the time of tournaments, or when somebody bugs me about it. It has really been just a side project when I get bored. However, I want to assure everyone in the CC community that my time is being well spent on a new project. ZCT will of course live forever as a GPL engine, so anyone can feel free to do whatever with it (legally
). It shouldn't be too hard to make it play decently, just rewrite the evaluation, search, and make SMP scale better.There are most likely some little bugs here and there, and I will do my best to fix them as I get time. SMP working is really a hit or miss. I think it should work, but I fixed the last bug earlier today, and I've only run a small number of test games to confirm. It hasn't crashed after doing plenty of benchmarking on an 8 core machine either.
As far as changes, far too many to remember, but here are some:
1. SMP probably working.
2. EGBBs removed.
3. New book format (this was a while back, around the 247x times, but after the last public release 2451).
4. Command line arguments. I did this as a request, but it's pretty cool. It's just a proxy for normal commands, so you can do anything that you would do on the command line. Each command starts with --. So you can do "./zct --force --e4 --display --perft 5 --analyze" or even "./zct --uci --go depth 15". Not that you'd want to, but I think it's cool.
5. You can specify the path to a configuration file with ./zct --config ZCT.ini. This was actually the reason for 4.
6. Evaluation parameters given names, and parsing made a bit easier. Look at ZCT.ini, and it shows every parameter for ZCT's eval in an almost-easy-to-edit way.
7. Auxiliary name for ZCT can be set with the "setname" command (usually in the ZCT.ini file, or on the command line). This is for creating personality names! The names are then sent to your favorite xboard/UCI compatible GUI. So you can create your very own "ZCTx64MP-0.3.2500-RybkaKiller", or, more realistically, "ZCTx64MP-0.3.2500234-RybkaVictim"
I suppose that's just about it. Big thanks to Kenny Dail, who has been annoying me about working on ZCT for quite a while, requesting new features, and discovering just how badly ZCT scales on 8 cores. Also thanks to Fonzy Bluemers, who does a lot of the same stuff, but has been taking a break for a while, and everyone else who has helped in ZCT's lifetime: Teemu Pudas, Swami, Wael Deeb for the book, the various testers, etc. Thanks to the users who have used ZCT too. I hope the next release you get from me will make you much happier than this.
Zach
