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 here 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!
Follow the discussion of MadChess 3.2 in the TalkChess forum.
Thank you very much for the excellent work with MadChess engine. Perhaps for a version 4 you might consider the NNUE evaluation, at some more convenient time in the future.
I’ve setup cutechess-cli and have been running some engine vs. engine tournaments with UCI_Elo set to 600-1100.
cutechess-cli has reported warnings of “Illegal PV move” from MadChess. This is some of the output I’ve seen :
Started game 16 of 42 (madchess_3.2_1000 vs texel___1.11_1000)
Warning: Illegal PV move g2g4 from madchess_3.2_1000 (15)
Warning: PV: Kf1 Bc6 g2g4
Started game 82 of 220 (madchess_3.2_1000 vs madchess_3.2_0700)
Warning: Illegal PV move b2b1 from madchess_3.2_1000 (81)
Warning: PV: Kxf1 b2b1
Started game 84 of 220 (madchess_3.2_0900 vs madchess_3.2_1100)
Warning: Illegal PV move g4g3 from madchess_3.2_0900 (83)
Warning: PV: Kg1 g4g3
I have fixed this bug.