Francesca M.A.D 0.19 released

[silentshark]

Title says it all.. available at www.silentshark.co.uk.

From the readme:

Can't remember all the changes! They were done back in May/ June 2011. As it's October, I thought it worth releasing.. The signifant change was to use a score "scaling" feature between the middle and endgame. In previous versions of Francesca, it was very binary - either a position was middlegame or it was endgame. In this version we calculate a mid- and end-game score for each position evaluation, then scale the score, depending on material left. Seems to help somewhat - private testing over 8000+ games indicates an improvement of around 30ELO.

[Thomas Lagershausen]

And what was the best game of Francesca M.A.D 0.19 in all this 8000 games?

[silentshark]

And what was the best game of Francesca M.A.D 0.19 in all this 8000 games?

Good question! Tell you what, I send you the 8000+ games, and you pick one

[Frank Quisinsky]

Hi Tom,

the disconnected SWCR Oldie-Mix tourney (with three new amateurs, one of them is your engine) will be restart again November 07th, 2011 and will be run around 45 days.

Of course with your engine.

Sorry for my confusion, but I had much problems with different of the oldies, not with your engine.

Thanks for the new version!

Best
Frank

[silentshark]

Hi Tom,

the disconnected SWCR Oldie-Mix tourney (with three new amateurs, one of them is your engine) will be restart again November 07th, 2011 and will be run around 45 days.

Of course with your engine.

Sorry for my confusion, but I had much problems with different of the oldies, not with your engine.

Thanks for the new version!

Best
Frank

Cheers, Frank, good to see you are still around on the CC scene.

I've been using my (limited) spare time for different things recently, like resurrecting some of my old C64 stuff, and playing around writing some (simplistic) video games.

[silentshark]

I've had a request for a version to run on older PC's. So I've re-introduced the "diet" version (it's in the zip), which should run better on old PC's - it uses 24Mb of RAM, and doesn't use the SSE2 extensions, so hopefully should run better on older kit. If it doesn't, drop me a line. Cheers all!

Tom

[Graham Banks]

Hi Tom,

I've found that if I create empty franbook.b and franbook.w files, this version of Francesca is happy to play with a GUI book.
Unless there's a problem created in doing this, it means I can finally test Francesca for the CCRL ratings and also include it in my amateur series.

Graham.

[silentshark]

Hi Tom,

I've found that if I create empty franbook.b and franbook.w files, this version of Francesca is happy to play with a GUI book.
Unless there's a problem created in doing this, it means I can finally test Francesca for the CCRL ratings and also include it in my amateur series.

Graham.

Cheers, Graham. From memory, the last few versions have supported the "force" winboard commands, so can use an external book. Doesn't work if (instead of a book) you are trying to start a game from a set position.

It would be frantastic (sorry!) if you could include my engine in some of your amateur competitions.

Like the idea behind the logo.. is this one of yours?

Cheers from the UK.

Tom

[Matthias Gemuh]

Hi Tom,

I've found that if I create empty franbook.b and franbook.w files, this version of Francesca is happy to play with a GUI book.
Unless there's a problem created in doing this, it means I can finally test Francesca for the CCRL ratings and also include it in my amateur series.

Graham.

Playing with a GUI book has been possible since Francesca M.A.D 0.15a,
by deleting the Francesca books.

Matthias.

[Graham Banks]

Cheers, Graham. From memory, the last few versions have supported the "force" winboard commands, so can use an external book. Doesn't work if (instead of a book) you are trying to start a game from a set position.

It would be frantastic (sorry!) if you could include my engine in some of your amateur competitions.

Like the idea behind the logo.. is this one of yours?

Cheers from the UK.

Tom

The logo is one I made to use. Others are welcome to use it too if they wish.