I don't want to say too much, but I have been getting a lot more motivated to work on computer chess again
I finally got around to testing a pull request made back in March (thanks again to Anurag Singh) which added support for Android. Support relies on an open source header file which I removed from the repository as it was too large for my taste and I didn't want to think about license implications. The patch author didn't have to change much code so I can recommend looking into the SSE2Neon headers for anyone looking to add Android support to their engines. The compilation instructions are pretty straightforward and if people need help I might upload a binary to google drive or something similar
The next step for Winter is Chess960 / Fischer Random support. This is something I have wanted to do for a while already, but have somehow hesitated. I also want to learn how to integrate network files into the binary without relying on a header file with all the weights. This approach has been fine so far as my networks have been very small, but there are ideas I have involving larger nets (eg some forms of policy nets).
The last point I have been thinking about is Summer; Winters alter ego. Current plan is for Summer to be an engine which is more general than Winter and almost certainly much weaker. Summer will start with a lot of the more boilerplate code from Winter: magic bitboards, bit level functions, etc. My thinking is I initially want to approach things as if I was unfamiliar with the game I am programming for and just relying on things I learned from computer chess that worked. This means I would implement things like LMR and null move pruning, as I would assume they could work in a wide variety of games, but perhaps not quiescent search, which seems more chess specific, even if fairly generalize-able.
My thinking here is for either Summer to become a general game playing agent that can play other games, such as Ataxx, or alternatively incrementally adding more Elo gaining features coming from a different angle than Winter. The idea is that depending on what features a program has, other search or evaluation features may be more or less effective. This means there is a risk programs end up in similar local optima.
I have to stress here not to have high expectations in Summer. I cannot even guarantee I will ever release it, and can almost guarantee it will never become stronger than my primary engine, Winter. It is more of a side-side-project where I feel I can be more experimental and playful. There is not even a guarantee the strength will not get worse between versions.
