I am within a few weeks of releasing my 3200+ ELO chess engine version 1.3.
And I know there are a lot of things which can be done cleaner, faster and better (reading posts of all smart people here).
The plan for version 1.4 is to make things cleaner, better, faster.
To prevent me spamming this forum I would very much like to have one specific “my chess engine” thread" and ask specific different questions in there and check if people are interested to help me out… Chess programming is quite difficult!
Would this be the place or in some other category?
I personally have no issue with a catch-all thread for questions that may or may not directly relate to each other within the domain of your project, though I would say just make a judgement call for each, as I am sure many of your questions probably could be generalized and applied more broadly, and may benefit on having greater visibility to others in the future,
Explain seems incrementally better, so I put it there. Truth is we don’t quite have a category which fits, but it’s totally on-topic for the forum itself so, carry on
I bet it is, what lead to you tackling this project? Is it the kind of thing you’ve done before?
Ok I’ll create one in “explain” when the time is there.
I have created some unfinished chess programs during the last 15 years (delphi, C# and rust) but never got further because I felt the languages where not good enough (Rust is but I abandoned it in favor of Zig).
Mostly I was just making movegenerators and a half-finished search.
Liking Zig very much I got on with it the last few months.
The algorithms and heuristics I find very interesting, but as we also can see in almost every chess engine, the coding of it is quite a anarchistic mess.
Now the engine is so strong that I decided to push the limits further.
You didn’t put your engine github which is here if I’m correct.
Thanks for putting the details of the changes in the release, I would be very interested in the impact of every features in terms of playing strength.
My engine is only 1700 on CCRL and there are still a lot of features to add and I am not sure which one to prioritize. At the moment I added SEE with like 50elo improvement. I will soon add capture history and continuation history but I find it hard to tweak the scale of the various bonus…
While I have rarely (never?) had much to add to your threads throughout this chess engine journey, I have still found them interesting to read, and learn about the solutions and techniques for the various problems to solve in this domain.
While I can technically only speak for myself, I don’t feel I am stepping outside my lane to assume that no one minds their frequency. My main point was to say don’t worry about “spamming this forum” with them. Many can still find them interesting/useful, even if they are not directly engaging with them.
Either way, I am glad that progress is still chugging along, I look forward to seeing more of it, whether that be in many or one thread.
