MadChess 3.2 Released

[Rowen]

I have released version 3.2 of my chess engine.

The main feature in this release is a sophisticated limit-strength mode, including adjustments to chess knowledge, search speed, chance of erring or blundering, and severity of blunders. MadChess, in limit-strength mode, excludes moves it considers unreasonable (dumb moves even a chess novice wouldn’t play). I have extensively documented the settings and technical implementation of MadChess’ limit-strength mode in The MadChess UCI_LimitStrength Algorithm. I also provide a Limit-Strength FAQ.

MadChess 3.2 is slightly stronger than the prior release. I estimate it has gained 60 rating points, climbing to roughly 2770 Elo at bullet chess.

This likely is the last release of MadChess- at least for a long while. I plan to focus more on playing chess instead of coding chess. And I plan to move on to other (non-chess) programming projects. You may follow along on my general programming blog, ErikTheCoder. Nothing new there yet. But I intend to resume blogging there soon. I’ll keep blogging on MadChess.net also, focused as I said on playing the game, not coding it.

You may download x64 and x86 versions of MadChess 3.2 from the Downloads page. Install the appropriate version for your computer’s CPU. The x64 binary is the strongest version of the engine.

Enjoy!

Thank you for this release. I have had some interesting/fun games against this release, using reduced strength. Seems you have worked hard on the reduced strength. Good to see a programmer doing this. So far the UCI elo strength that I have chosen is about the same level as my OTB elo (English Chess federation) Most of the games I have won has been due to the program making tactical errors necessitating attacking play on my part to win, hence it has been fun.