New engine releases & news H1 2026

[Jjaw]

The engine is useless.

I agree, it is a useless buggy piece of junk

[Tibono]

The engine is useless.

I agree, it is a useless buggy piece of junk

With regards to a release that was NOT intended to be used and NOT suggested nor advertised to do so, the first comment was a fact and would have been better said "useless so far". On another hand, the second comment is really unfair, not nice and very unfriendly to the author. Shame on you.
Eric

[Jjaw]

I said that cause the engine froze my entire laptop up when I tried to use it in shredder gui. I had to hold the laptop power button down for 20 seconds & force a shutdown & reboot to unfreeze my laptop. That's junk.

[Carbec]

Hi Philippe,

hope you can find the problems.
The French programs are the first, after Stockfish I will test with my ETOC-G idea.

Reason is very simple:
French programmers helping me in Winboard and Arena times most with Website activities, ideas and give me 100% support, also great support for Martin Blume. French programmers powered Winboard a lot, without all they work they do ... long years ago, but never I forget it.

The trophy for the tournament in Massy (French programmers computer chess tournament) comes from me in combination with a deal with the German chess magazine CSS ... as thank you.

So, each French programmer are allways in first position (in my brain).
And Zangdar is very strong and must be test very soon.

Best
Frank

So I have a hell of a lot of respect for it.
Franck ZIBI, Lucas or Christian BARRETAU, all the others ... so nice guys. Franck ZIBI was the French answer to Rudolf Huber. Rudolf Huber is a German programmer (SOS). At this time all German programmers I know had the same opinion. The programmer with the most knowledge about programming in Germany. For an example: Opinion from World Champion Stefan Meyer-Kahlen at this time, but not only Stefan say that. Franck ZIBI was the French answere.

Now you must take over the inheritance Philippe.



It also fits somehow... a country to fall in love with.

Hi Frank

Thanks for your appreciation of Zangdar. But there are several other programs stronger than mine ! You put the bar very high , I don't have the shoulders to support such an inheritance .
Well, I corrected the problem in Zangdar, and version 6.1 is released.

Best regards
Philippe

[Aleks Peshkov]

Petrel 3.3.1 (NNUE) and Petrel 2.3.1 (PeSTO) released.

Fixed bug that may lead to loss on time in less than 1% of games.
Strength should be almost identical to 3.3 and 2.3

https://github.com/AleksPeshkov/petrel/releases/tag/v3.3.1
https://github.com/AleksPeshkov/petrel/releases/tag/v2.3.1

[Jim Ablett]

A very (very) interesting chess project !

https://github.com/jay-codes-chess/human-chess-engine

My & ChatGPT logo:

How do you guys find this stuff so quickly?

Here's the story:

I'm sure some of you have heard of "OpenClaw" (formerly known as moltbot and clawdbot) - its an open source bot which can take any LLM, use it as a brain and work basically 24/7. It is even proactive and will work without guidance.

I created one, named it "Jay" and got him working on my "dream" engine.

Problem is, he is running on a Mac and has no windows environment for debugging.

Maybe one of our geniuses in the community can figure out what is causing it not to run, but as you guys know, I can't code if i life depends on it.

I do plan to give "Jay" some way of running on Windows though. We'll see.

The project is mostly curiosity (if he could pull it off), but also. personal passion.

Nobody was supposed to use it yet, but Jay thought the easiest way to give me binaries to test was to just create releases.

Impressed by how fast our community found it. Still a LOT of passion for computer chess here.

Hi Brendan,

I think your project is a nice idea, to have an engine that plays 'human-like' with realtime annotation comments. I downloaded the src code (luckily before you deleted the project) and have been tinkering with it to get it to a somewhat useable/playable state.

Download fixed src code here with Windows executable here:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/AZBWR4SW84#mlX0vmx0VG6l

I apologize for some the nasty comments of some users on here and hope you will consider continuing with the project,

regards,
Jim.

[BrendanJNorman]

A very (very) interesting chess project !

https://github.com/jay-codes-chess/human-chess-engine

My & ChatGPT logo:

How do you guys find this stuff so quickly?

Here's the story:

I'm sure some of you have heard of "OpenClaw" (formerly known as moltbot and clawdbot) - its an open source bot which can take any LLM, use it as a brain and work basically 24/7. It is even proactive and will work without guidance.

I created one, named it "Jay" and got him working on my "dream" engine.

Problem is, he is running on a Mac and has no windows environment for debugging.

Maybe one of our geniuses in the community can figure out what is causing it not to run, but as you guys know, I can't code if i life depends on it.

I do plan to give "Jay" some way of running on Windows though. We'll see.

The project is mostly curiosity (if he could pull it off), but also. personal passion.

Nobody was supposed to use it yet, but Jay thought the easiest way to give me binaries to test was to just create releases.

Impressed by how fast our community found it. Still a LOT of passion for computer chess here.

Funny, My youngest son just setup one (OpenClaw) on his PC and called it "Mother". Mother do this, and mother do that ... Drives my wife crazy! He says it with a European accent of course.

haha yeah Openclaw is a very interesting hint at what the future holds. Soon we'll alll be running 24/7 digital assistants for things we do on the web/PC.

Your boy sounds like a funny dude.

Hope you're doing well, Ted.

[BrendanJNorman]

A very (very) interesting chess project !

https://github.com/jay-codes-chess/human-chess-engine

My & ChatGPT logo:

How do you guys find this stuff so quickly?

Here's the story:

I'm sure some of you have heard of "OpenClaw" (formerly known as moltbot and clawdbot) - its an open source bot which can take any LLM, use it as a brain and work basically 24/7. It is even proactive and will work without guidance.

I created one, named it "Jay" and got him working on my "dream" engine.

Problem is, he is running on a Mac and has no windows environment for debugging.

Maybe one of our geniuses in the community can figure out what is causing it not to run, but as you guys know, I can't code if i life depends on it.

I do plan to give "Jay" some way of running on Windows though. We'll see.

The project is mostly curiosity (if he could pull it off), but also. personal passion.

Nobody was supposed to use it yet, but Jay thought the easiest way to give me binaries to test was to just create releases.

Impressed by how fast our community found it. Still a LOT of passion for computer chess here.

Hi Brendan,

I think your project is a nice idea, to have an engine that plays 'human-like' with realtime annotation comments. I downloaded the src code (luckily before you deleted the project) and have been tinkering with it to get it to a somewhat useable/playable state.

Download fixed src code here with Windows executable here:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/AZBWR4SW84#mlX0vmx0VG6l

I apologize for some the nasty comments of some users on here and hope you will consider continuing with the project,

regards,
Jim.

Hi Jim,

Firstly, I have been on Talkchess long enough that the nasty comments don't get to me anymore.

The world is full of shitty and good people, and if we leave both alone, both groups reveal themselves without help.

My thanks to you (and Tibono) for speaking up for me though.

Both of you are appreciated.

Right now Im a busy chess coach with only a single real day off each week, so Im really just tinkering over a glass of wine and playing with AI most of the time lol.

I deleted it because I didn't want people (like those entitled "gimme gimme gimme" guys in the thread) to think something was for sale (or free, in this case).

I'm just tinkering and having fun with a hobby.

I have downloaded your improvements and will have a look.

You're a legend of computer chess, my friend.

I am 42 years old now, and I believe I was downloading your compiles in my teens.

So thanks for everything.

[Frank Quisinsky]

Hi Brenden,

You wrote:
The world is full of shitty and good people, and if we leave both alone, both groups reveal themselves without help.

That's fact!
Many of people like it to wrote about own activities, and lose the view to the left and right sides. Others like to always emphasizing one's own name as something special. And we have the people with many bad days in the year, can read it in comments about this and that one. Furthermore, many copycats you will find in fora.

The days are long gone when a proud programmer would present a result and tons of people would jump on it and get carried away by the excitement. Today, to many computer chess stuff is available.

Honestly, I am also in a group of "bad" persons. My own activities are most of time in the foreground and I have often bad and good days. At the moment I am thinking to buy white chocolete today, can be a good day ... if the chocolete is good. I can't work a long time on the same topic, because I am searching my long life a better way again and again, not important what I do. Imagination compels you to do so.

End of the day all is OK and we learn to understand others, things what we would never do ourselves. In case of Brenden, I like to read you, since many years.

And to Jim.
He makes our computer chess life more interesting, is a nice guy. He is the leading scientist in open source and is interested in new things. He could also use his knowledge to promote his own activities, but he doesn't. Unfortunately, these people are slowly dying out. The reason for this lies more in the media's compulsion to bombard us with information and our addiction to absorbing it.

Best
Frank

PS: But after all ..
It's all the ladies' fault.