Tony Thomas wrote:We rarely get the chance to gang up on an engine author and make him release an engine. I wish someone had done the same with Ferret, Searcher etc..Thanks Julien...
Hehe, you're welcome, even if I feel a bit busted
I hope you'll have fun with the engine, though. And I'd appreciate any feedback. The engine will probably not crash, nor will it play illegal moves (except when he just have a few microseconds left maybe) or cause any memory leak and so on, as I make a new version play against itself 200 times in Arena before validating it, but there can be some logical bugs still. For exemple, it's only recently that I noticed that Prédateur could still miss a checkmate from time to time (fixed in version 0.1.3x, though the bug occurs only very rarely in v0.1.1).
Anyway, I use beta versions of the Free Pascal Compiler, so maybe some problems may come from that. Especially on non-intel systems, as I only test Pred on my Core 2 Duo. Please, note too that a 64bits build for older versions than 0.1.2 is useless, as I only started to use 64bits integer with v 0.1.2 (for Zobrist keys).
As I yet stated, this branch of the source is abandonned, now, as I'm rewriting Prédateur from scratch using bitboards. Not only for speed reason, but also because the code had started to look like a mess. Besides, since the first version 0.1.3x I have a strange new bug making Pred select not optimal moves. Like it'll for exemple take a protected knight with its queen, from time to time. This bug is not present in the version I released, though.
I'll soon release the last fully working version of Prédateur on its website : that was v0.1.3b2. Sadly, the bug I talked about started to happen with v0.1.3b3, and I don't have the b2 sources anymore, as I didn't save the sources for beta versions at that time (now I do, as this bad experience proved me that modifying just a single line of a chess engine can have serious consequences).
All right, the day I'll decide that Pred reached a good level enough, I'll release the old version too, so you'll understand why I prefered waiting a little bit.
