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I haven't done a deep look but I think Carlsen was ok out of the opening. He got in big trouble later.

--Jon

I did Fortran coding on cards, circa 1972. Code it up on the official IBM coding sheet, take it to the keypunch room, punch up the cards (don't make a single mistake!) and hand it over to the operator. Come back in a few hours and see if it compiled/ran or not.

--Jon

IMO you have to look not just at forced draws but also consider that some configurations with pawns might be hard to win or could be exchanged down into a drawn ending. See adjustMaterialScore in https://github.com/jdart1/arasan-chess/ ... coring.cpp.

--Jon

I have fixed piece values and they are not very different from the ones quoted here. But I have a lot of adjustments on top of those: for example, a "trade down" term that encourages trades of pieces when ahead, and a bunch of special-case endgame code that evaluates piece configurations when low in...

I keep one Windows box as my main desktop, mostly to run Chessbase, Lightroom, Quickbooks, and some other essential apps (I don't think Wine is an option for all of these). Chessbase is an essential tool IMO: I use it daily. I have four Linux boxes and have had more at one point, and those are for p...

Back in the 1980's I worked for TeleSoft, which at the time was one of the major Ada compiler vendors. Their Ada development system was written in Ada and the whole stack (compiler/linker/debugger/tools) was about a million lines of code.

I haven't done any Ada coding since then, though.

--Jon

To answer your question more directly though: Nelder-Mead simplex is a "black box" optimization method, which means it does not rely on the gradient of the function being available. Therefore it is commonly used for nonlinear functions (but even in that domain it is not the best method). For evaluat...

This was discussed (among other topics) quite recently in this thread: http://talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=68326.

--Jon

It can play really nice positional chess. But it still seems to have occasional tactical blindness. The modern alpha-beta engines are so selective, they are throwing out huge pieces of the search tree. But it is still kind of amazing to me that these NN engines can play as well as they do, since the...

I try to avoid the std-library as much as possible, C++ has a lot of nice features but IMHO the std-library is not one of them There are a lot of powerful features in the standard library: regex (C++11), streams, iterators, the tools in <algorithms> for example. But there is certainly a learning cu...