Thank You

Thanks to all the people that helped develop my curiosity in chess and chess programming. Or perhaps I should say instead, curse you for infecting me with the chess programming virus? 🙂

Community

Thanks to the TalkChess community for their generous and patient explanations of chess programming concepts. The advice I’ve found on the TalkChess forum is critical to the success of my MadChess project, especially in the early days when I struggled to understand basic concepts like alpha-beta pruning and principal variation search. Thanks also to TalkChess contributors willing to get into intricate details of advanced programming concepts, especially Robert Hyatt, H. G. Muller, Ed Schroder (Ed’s Rebel website is excellent), Lucas Braesch, Steve Maughan, and the late Don Dailey. I may not post frequently, but I read the TalkChess forum often and find the technical discussions illuminating. This blog, and my open source engine, is my effort to repay the TalkChess community.

Thanks to the authors of chess engines that have sparred with MadChess.

Thanks to the CCRL community (especially Graham Banks) for testing MadChess in numerous chess engine tournaments.

Technical

Thanks to Martin Sedlak for providing test positions and correct legal move counts. These helped me verify the correctness of MadChess’ move generation code.

Thanks to Peter Österlund for sharing his tuning technique. Thanks to James McCaffrey for describing how to tune multiple parameters simultaneously in an extremely large parameter-space using a Particle Swarm algorithm. Inspired by Peter and James, I wrote tuning code that has increased MadChess’ playing strength simply by adjusting evaluation parameters.

Thanks to Miguel Ballicora for providing the Elo-estimation program Ordo. Without Miguel’s efforts I’d never know (with a specific level of confidence) whether my code changes strengthened or weakened MadChess.

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