Introducing Octochess

[Codesquid]

Greetings,

I'd like to introduce Octochess, a new chess engine I've been working on since July 2011. It's an open source and cross-platform engine using CECP and distributed under the terms and conditions of the GPL.

The engine itself is quite boring, it just employs many of the well-known concepts. The source code is a somewhat of a mess. When I started, I didn't know the slightest about what makes a good engine. Also, I never intended to spend this much time on it. So it's all a giant hack.

Two engines I've extensively tested my engine against are GNU Chess 5.07 and Fruit 2.01. Octochess is able to win against GNU Chess most of the time but so far has only won against Fruit once with the occasional draw. There's plenty of room for improvement though, in particular I've spent almost no time on tuning the evaluation. I've got a framework though to tweak the evaluation terms using a primitive genetic algorithm using the evaluation scores printed by other engines as fitness factor. Octochess' playing style seems strange, near total lack of regard for king safety, definitely one of the things I'd like to look into next.

Perhaps an interesting feature of Octochess is its opening book. Basically it's just a collection of pre-calculated move evaluation scores for common opening positions. It's devoid of any deeper chess knowledge and suffers from the horizon effect. Most likely a totally unsound approach, but at least it helps to save time on the opening phase and makes my electricity company happy.

I've been lurking in these forums for quite some time now, reading a lot of posts and would like to thank all who have already asked the questions I also ran into and those of you who tirelessly answered answered these questions. In particular I'd like to thank Robert Hyatt for providing his valuable insight.

[tmokonen]

Wait, what, the FileZilla guy made a chess engine? Cool! Thank you for the new engine, Tim.

I tried running your Windows compile on my non-SSE 4.2 x64 system, and it didn't seem to work. I guess it's a compile that would need a CPU with POPCNT support?

[Sean Evans]

[EDIT BY MODERATION, AFTER SOME LEGITIMATE COMPLAIN]

Please, refrain from aggressing newcomers. Or whoever for that matter.

[/EDIT]

[tmokonen]

[MODERATION: Message erased]

He used YOUR program. What are you going to do about it?

[zullil]

Please, just ignore him.

[tmokonen]

God, a person can't even tell a joke around here without being scolded.

[JuLieN]

[tmokonen]

I have to say, Jack is one handsome fellow.

[JuLieN]

I have to say, Jack is one handsome fellow.

Hehe, and in good company. Beware to William, he bites!

[sje]

Thank you for providing an open source chess program. The more of these, the better.

If your program has an account at ICC, you are welcome to match it against my program Symbolic -- it's back after a five month hiatus.