Neurosis and Neurosis-3D 1.6

[Stan Arts]

Geschrieben von: / Posted by: Stan Arts at 24 January 2004 12:20:50:

Hi everyone
I finished a new version of Neurosis. 1.6
Lots of changes.
Some of the changes of the 3D version are:
The board looks different now, more realistic and wood-like.
Tried to make the program more complete. Lots of new options and improvements.
New timecontrols to chose from, with more common used timecontrols.
Captured pieces are kept and placed next to the board (as an option), to add
to realism and for instance to help beginning players keep better track of
pieces and what's going on.
You can change the size of the pieces on the board, you can change the speed to
fly and look around with, (For fast/slow computers) and some other new options.
The result of a game is now also saved to PGN as 1-0 , 0-1 , 1/2-1/2 or ? .
My 3D code has improved and for the rest a lot of minor changes and
improvements everywhere. And the same chessplaying improvements as the winboard
version.
Some of the chessplaying improvements are:
It's nearly 20% faster overall.
Quiescent search improvements, now knows about pinned pieces (to the king) so
it can not recapture with them, smarter, and sometimes figuring out complicated
tactics a little earlyer.
My movegenerators now know a king can not touch the other king on the board,
and don't generate these moves anymore. Before, the search would remove these,
like other putting-itself-in-check moves, but this way it's nicer.
Improved timecontrols, especially in incremental controls.
Evaluation improvements, better tuned and it plays more solid and resiliant,
but can also atack better.
Many hashtablechanges. This version has no trouble finding 3x draws again
because of them, and improved replacementstrategies and it's keeping more
values after actual-game moves saving more nodes in actual gameplay.
New option, "vary" where when enabled it'll use small random values in
evaluation to vary it's play to some extent. This is something to make it play
more human-like again along with the other options, because when enabled it'll
make the program slightly weaker, so it's not very usefull in comp-comp games.
Also improved the speculative modes. It would often fail high/low because I
kept the searchwindows as normal but because of the larger positional values
should of been a bit wider.
Fixed bugs. One serious one was incase of wanting to do a nullmove and
finding a position to be a repetition draw, the null-move reduced depth
wouldn't always be restored. Also at the start of the program I forgot to let
the program make a random randomseed to start with. That would cause it to use
the same booklines often instead of playing very varying like was intended.
That's about it.. Hopefully it's a little stronger.
Hope you'll enjoy it!
Stan
Will hopefully soon be available on Leo Dijksman's winboard pages. (thanks!)
www.wbec-ridderkerk.nl select downloads and scroll to Neurosis.

[Leo Dijksman]

Geschrieben von: / Posted by: Leo Dijksman at 24 January 2004 13:01:59:
Als Antwort auf: / In reply to: Neurosis and Neurosis-3D 1.6 geschrieben von: / posted by: Stan Arts at 24 January 2004 12:20:50:


[KNIP]

Will hopefully soon be available on Leo Dijksman's winboard pages. (thanks!)
www.wbec-ridderkerk.nl select downloads and scroll to Neurosis.

Thanks Stan,
It can be download now!
Other engine news:
New engine: AICE v0.1 from Greece.
Best wishes,
Leo.



WBEC Ridderkerk homepage.