Alouette 0.0.1

[Daniel Anulliero]

Add some pieces square tables
Anyway good To see you always in our "crazy world" Roland

[Roland Chastain]

Thank you Daniel. I added piece square tables and a kind of minimax. Now Alouette sometimes mates against very easy opponents. It's a beginning.

I also made a perft executable, using Alouette code. I was glad to see that it gives good results, but I was disappointed when I made a comparison with H.G. Muller perft tool. Here H.G. Muller tool computes perft(5) in more or less 50 milliseconds, my tool in 50... seconds.

Alouette 0.0.4 is here.

Not yet tried perft in FRC mode.

[Daniel Anulliero]

Cool !
Now, Alouette become a chess program, not a randomizer

Well , you know, perft is not crucial... ask To Raoni, the Pirarucu's chess developer, Pirarucu haven't a very fast perft, but It is very strong
Bests
Dany

[zulban]

Neato project.

Software development tip: I strongly suggest TDD to iron out bugs regarding illegal moves. Not sure, but I don't see a test suite. See also here for another project using TDD for chess move generation.

[Roland Chastain]

@Daniel
Thank you for the information.

@zulban
Thank you for your message. I followed your suggestion and started a test unit. It made me discover some bugs.

I updated the git repository but didn't build a new version of the engine, because the bugs fixed don't change the behaviour of the engine.

[Ovyron]

I would like to explore very simple ideas, and why not make a kind of toy engine for children, with personnalities.

For personalities, simple ideas that work well is just personalities that value material differently. These ideas worked well for fun Personalities for the Pro Deo Chess engine (each hyphen is followed by an idea):

-Values Knights much higher than Bishops (400 CPs for Knights, 200 CPs for Bishops)
-Gives incredible bonus to Bishop Pair (200 CPs if both Bishops are present)
-Overvalues Knights and Bishops, undervalues Rooks (all three pieces on 350 CPs)
-Undervalues Pawns (25 CPs for pawns)
-Overvalues Pawns (150 CPs for pawns, 200 CPs for pawns in contact with King)
-Undervalues Queen (600 CPs so it tries to exchange Queen for lesser material)
-Queen Trade Avoider (thinks own queen is 1200 CPs and opponent's is 600 CPs)
-Pawn Promoter (300 CP bonus for unopposed, unstoppable passed pawn, and bonus grows as pawn advances)

Now, Alouette's personalities will play interestingly not mainly because of how they evaluate board's material, but because of the way they'd think the opponent evaluates board material. Something I haven't seen tried is such things only applied to one's side, so the opposing pieces are evaluated normally, while yours have these concepts. And vice versa, so each idea could produce three different players.

[Roland Chastain]

@Ovyron

Thank you for the interesting idea.

[tpoppins]

Roland, I tried v0.0.3 and v0.0.4 vs. Sapeli in random-mover mode. It turned out to be an exercise in frustration.

Alouette stalls under Cute Chess GUI and Arena 3.5.1, and only when playing black pieces. Both v0.0.3 and v0.0.4 do, the latter perhaps somewhat less than the former. They just stop moving, with 0% CPU usage in Task Manager. Under Arena they lose on time, under CC the game is terminated as "stalled connection".

The OS is Win 7 x64 Pro SP1. The box is a 12-core dual Xeon, the chips are Westmere. Perhaps it's a dependency issue that would go away if I built from source. I have no idea what toolchain/compiler is need on Windoze for that. Perhaps you could try different compiling options?

[Roland Chastain]

Hello Tirsa!

Thank you very much for testing Alouette and reporting the result. I am sorry that you encountered that problem. It's strange, because I am also under Windows, and I also use Cute Chess, and never had that problem.

Alouette is a very basic Pascal program. To compile it, you just need the Free Pascal Compiler.

I will follow your suggestion and try different building options. I could also provide a binary compiled with DEBUG option: it produces a log file. I come back as soon as it is done.

[Roland Chastain]

I have made a ZIP file including a binary compiled with DEBUG option: it's alouette.exe. The other files (alouette32.exe and alouette64.exe) are binaries compiled with RELEASE option. The main difference is that the DEBUG version produces a log file.

alouette-20190429.zip

@Tirsa
If you have time for a new test, please use alouette.exe.