Engine Updates

Update: Myrddin 0.81 Alpha 2
– Greatly improved move generation speed (perft 6 on initial position has gone from 57 to 41 seconds on P4-3.0)
– Search now pings the input command handler every 8K nodes (about 1/30-1/50 second, depending on position and hardware), so applicable commands can now be entered during search/analysis
– Search will allocate extra thinking time when it gets noticeable drop in score
– Evaluation improvements – pawn structure, open and semi-open files for rooks, rooks behind passers, king safety
– Added MVV/LVA and PV Move Ordering
– Added Killer and History move ordering heuristics
– Added Null Move reductions
– Added Late Move reductions
– Added Opening Book (ProDeo – Thanks, Ed!)
– Added pondering, so “hard” and “easy” commands are now supported
– “analyze”, ”?” and “result” commands are now supported
– “level” command is now fully supported for all time control types
– Added check for dirty pawn structure before evaluation
– Search can be interrupted due to time management considerations
– Added Hash Tables, with a fixed size of 128MB
– Maximum search depth increased from 20 to 30
– Fixed a bug with evaluating castling moves
– Fixed a bug determining which King piece table to use
– Can now generate capturing moves only so quiescent search has less moves to sort/deal with
– Quiescent moves are added to PV
– Added code for pushing lone King towards edge of board
– Added material and 50-move draw detection
– Fixed a bug in the “undo” and “remove” commands
– Fixed some bugs in the 3-fold repetition detection
– Fixed a stupid bug that caused me to check for user input WAY too often – many thanks to Bob Hyatt for pointing me in the right direction
– Significant code cleanup
http://computer-chess.org/doku.php?id=computer_chess:engines:myrddin:index

Info Only: Mainsworthy, Son of Mainsworthy, etc.
opening books updated
http://wbec-ridderkerk.nl/html/details1/Mainsworthy.html (Leo)
http://wbec-ridderkerk.nl/html/details1/SOMainsworthy.html (Leo)
http://www.geocities.com/markjamestop/ (homepage)

Info Only: Down chess websites
none found

SourceForge back to being very slow again
Pulsar back up after being down for 3 days
BlackBishop back up after being down for 1 day
Sloppy back up after being down for 1 day

Chess News

Update: Polyglot 1.4w23
Polyglot was written by Fabien Letouzey. This is the Fonzy Bluemers modification.
"Create books from pgn files that have FEN tags in the games, this should work now. "
http://www.geenvis.net/

Info Only: Norm Pollock 40H PGN Utilities
3 program names were changed:
"nameResult" is now called "resultList"
"intraFamily" is now called "pairSimilar"
"splitPgn" is now called "splitter"
http://www.hoflink.com/~npollock/chess.html

Wiki Changes

GUI Protocol List
added xChess and Zugzwang to Discontinued Chess GUIs
Thief link updated

Myrddin
engine updated (see above)