Chickenpox

I woke up this morning feel a bit weak and tired. I was feeling a bit feverish too. Then, I noticed that I had rashes coming on my chest. My worries were confirmed in the evening when the doctor announced that I have Chickenpox.

I have been asked to take 2 weeks bed rest. I guess I won't be able to give my internal exams.

Beach boyz

It was a real nice end to a rather boring day. The day started with the systems programming lab.. in which I couldn't even do some simple programs (I will take care of that). Fortunately we had only one hour in the afternoon.
We had some major plans for the evening... Me and Auto were going to give the guys our birthday treat. So we picked up some KFs and left for Cherai in one maruti and one Dio. We were having fun the whole time during the drive. When we arrived at the beach it was totally empty, it was like as if we had our own private beach. We had a nice time chatting, making tunnels in the sand, doing long jumps, doing cartwheels and somersaults and (my favorite) watching at the expanse of the ocean in front of us. We had our dinner (which was very nice) and spent some more time on the beach. We returned when we realized that it was getting to late and that the tide was rising too much.. all in all it was one of those days which I would never forget...

Time control in computer chess part 2

I finally managed to get around the problem which I was encountering in the time controlled search. The problem was that most of the time , even when the search was going deeper it was giving a bad move (due to time restrictions) than a shallow search. So what I did was modify the algorithm to something like this:

search(-INF,+INF,4,&line);

best_move=line.argmove[0];

for(i=5;i<MAX_DEPTH;i++) {

search(-INF,+INF,i,&line);

if(!timefail) {

best_move=line.armove[0];

continue;

}

else {

return best_move;

}

}

With this the computer had a shallow best move before going deeper.

Time control in computer chess

I hadn't made any major attempts at improving my chess engine. I had just added some features to the evaluation routine. So, I thought why not add time control to it ,so that it doesn't always do a fixed depth (4 ply) search. I looked up some texts and came up with a way to do an iterative alpha beta search with time control. I was able to implement it, but the results were bad. The chess engine started playing badly. So I reverted back to the older fixed depth search. (Sigh..)

Another finals

Finals seem to be unlucky for me. This time it was the university sports basketball finals (B.tech vs Rest of CUSAT). We had a fairly good team, but it was a bad day for us. In the first quarter , at one point , we were down 15-0. Somehow we started to catch up but we couldn't make the lead go away. For the rest of CUSAT team , anything they shot at the basket was falling in. For us it was the other way round. We were defending well and also playing well as a team, but the baskets were just not falling in. The ground support for the Rest of CUSAT team was also pretty prominent and I and everyone else got abused lavishly. I played the whole 4 quarters like my other team mates (Pylee, Steve, Kirtan and Arun Thomas). All in all we put in the best that we could, but we still lost. The final score was something like 49-26. I guess we will be able to take care of them next year.

I got a computer account..

I had waited for qutie long and finally now I got a computer account on FICS. The handle I got is BlueFlash.. Right now it is playing its first games...
Anyway we had a basketball match today.. we beat the opposing team but we didn't play a good game. Anshul also got into the team.. ;-)

A long week

This week has been really long and I hadn't got time to do all the things I was planning to. I havent even started on the GUI for my project.. then I was planning to study some of the subject which I'm not too clear. I fortunately made it into the B.tech basketball team and we have a match tomorrow.. hope we do well. Also the chess engine is playing on FICS pretty well. I haven't got a registered computer account , so it plays on a guest account.

Watching ..

Watching the computer beat other humans is eye candy.. except when the opponent is yourself...

Jumping horses.

The whole day was spent in testing, fiddling and playing with the chess engine. I decided to call it BlueFlash. I was able to remove some of its problems but there are still some issues which remain unresolved. It played some games on FICS (unrated) and it did win some of them... mostly by the opponent forfeiting on time.. but it did play well. I right now am collecting some mate in two/ three move puzzles which I may use in the demonstration. I also applied for a computer account on FICS ( I hope I get one).

Frankenstein

"It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs."

So today, I lent a brain (pronounced as alpha beta pruning) to my creation (also better known as a chess engine) and it played its very first game against me. To my surprise it was actually beating me. I didn't like it so I quit the game halfway and went to tell Rahul what had just happened. Rahul, suggested that I match it up with crafty. I took that suggestion and ,as expected , crafty won. But I'm pretty happy that v1.0 of the chess engine is almost out. I am right now thinking of a good name to give it. BTW Frankenstein is out of question ;-)

The project gets a tiny brain.

I made a static evaluation function for the program, and now it doesn't play randomly.. it now plays stupidly.. Which is progress ( I guess).

The random chess engine.

We had class in the morning ... we bunked the last two hours but some suckers stayed back .. dunno why ..and we lost our attendance. I went to play Basketball in the evening.. After coming back, I started working on my project and I was able to make it play a random game of chess. I could also interface the chess engine to XBoard. The chess engine also played an extremely poor game against crafy on FICS (and lost, obviously). I guess I will start working on the thinking part now.

Work and play

I had class in the morning and in the afternoon (as usual). I came back and started debugging the move generator. I removed some of the bugs but I still am not getting the right result for the position:

r3k2r/p1ppqpb1/bn2pnp1/3PN3/1p2P3/2N2Q1p/PPPBBPPP/R3K2R w KQkq -

perft(1) is correct, but above depth 1 I'm getting incorrect results.

I and Anshul went to play basketball in the evening and after that we all went to Pizza hut.

I returned and have implemented the setBoard function which takes in a FEN
string and sets up the board according to it.

I should probably stop worrying too much about the bad perft results and start working on the other parts of the project, or maybe I should just go to sleep.

Perft debugging.

I said yesterday that the move generator was complete. Well, not quite. I wrote the perft test, for move generation,today, and found a lot of bugs. Right now I'm testing the perft values for other test positions so that I can remove the bugs. Really frustrating.