Tag: Piece Mobility

I have not worked on my chess engine in over a year. I had other, more important, priorities. In the last year, my wife and I bought a new home closer to the city, sold our old home, moved (*), started new jobs in the summer, and ran the Chicago Marathon in the autumn. The little free time I had for hobby programming I spent on general interest projects, not on MadChess. I’m especially proud of Leaderless Replication, an essay I published on my general programming blog, ErikTheCoder. Lately I’ve had time to do some chess programming. I added piece… Continue Reading

I added piece mobility evaluation to MadChess 2.0 Beta. The candidate moves of each piece are counted (move legality is not tested) and a non-linear bonus is assigned. Pieces with few moves are penalized. Pieces with many moves are awarded. Assigning a non-linear bonus encourages MadChess to develop all of its pieces, as opposed to maximizing the candidate moves of a few pieces. For example, more centipawns are awarded for increasing the candidate moves of a knight from three to six moves than for increasing the candidate moves of a queen from 14 to 20. This added 64 Elo to… Continue Reading