Program Suggestions

[Vladimir Xern]

Dear Programmers,

We have plenty of analysis engines already. Here are a couple of things we are genuinely short of:

1) A dedicated mate-solver that is UCI, 64-bit and multi-processor. In other words, a successor to Chest.

There is nothing else close to Chest in this regard, and I think that both the engine author and the UCI interface author are tired of working on it.
Now, Chest does not use bitboards, so the only real gain of 64 bit will be bigger hash tables. So if you want to see a real huge boost, you will have to talk someone into writing a 64 bit SMP chess mate solver.

Here's the rub:
It's at quarter of a million dollar effort to write it and the only reward is that people will give you nothing for it and in five years they are going to whine because it is not 128 bit and cluster ready.

Chest is great, of course, but one of the deficiencies that was never properly addressed was its helpmate/helpstalemate solving. I have the vague recollection that Heiner may have had some ideas for that that never made it upstream, but I'm not sure (very helpful, I know).