Author: Erik Madsen

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Running Multiple Engine Tournaments Simultaneously With the Myracle GUI

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A New Engine-Focused GUI Martin Sedlák, long time member of the chess programming community and author of the Cheng engine, has written a chess GUI named Myracle. Martin has generously provided Myracle free of charge. Myracle is GUI that specializes in running chess engine tournaments. In this it excels. Myracle has a killer feature that convinced me to uninstall the Cute Chess GUI and rely solely on Myracle for all chess engine testing. A few days ago, I posted on TalkChess, “Recently, I used the Myracle GUI to run four divisional 5+3 blitz tournaments plus three cross-division tournaments simultaneously. Then… Continue Reading

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MadChess 3.4 Released

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I have released version 3.4 of my chess engine. This release is focused on simplifying code. The engine is not any stronger than MadChess 3.3 at bullet time control, though perhaps it’s stronger at blitz and rapid time controls. I don’t know. I haven’t measured the strength of MadChess in blitz and rapid games since version 3.0. As a first step toward establishing more complete ratings of MadChess and other engines, I have run multi-division round robin tournaments at blitz and rapid time controls. These tournaments include 48 engines in four divisions, with MadChess 3.4 participating in Division 3. See… Continue Reading

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Create an Opening Repertoire Using Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro and Pgn-Extract.exe

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If you wish to skip the backstory, go directly to the Authoring Procedure and Usage. Needs About a year ago, I decided to shift my focus from programming chess to playing chess. Since then, I’ve played many games online and gotten a feel for blitz and rapid time controls. I’ve realized a valuable technique for improving my play is to review my games. This is especially important for an adult learner, such as myself, in my 50s. Ideally, immediately after finishing a game, I’ll review it and determine where I erred tactically or where I allowed my opponent to erode… Continue Reading

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MadChess 3.3 Released

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I have released version 3.3 of my chess engine. This release adds static exchange evaluation and integrates it into futility pruning and deferring the search of losing captures. This pushed MadChess’ playing strength above 2800 Elo. In addition, I adjusted formulas used to calculate internal limit-strength engine parameters to be based on 2800 Elo instead of 2600 Elo. If you adjusted any values in the MadChess.AdvancedConfig.json file, please recalculate per instructions included in comments in the file. The engine’s UCI_Elo option still has a max value of 2600, though, because the non-PVS search (alpha / beta window remains open at… Continue Reading

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Do Tough Things

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I read an interesting post on a computer chess forum last night. It began: Dixondeuxyeux’s Post I thought I would share a few observations that might be of interest to some of you. It was Mark Twain who wrote, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” I like this adage because it is a humbling reminder that the game we enjoy so much is a brutally honest and cruel taskmaster. It is believed that after the first nine moves of any game, the possible continuations outnumber… Continue Reading