Best feature?

[Thomas Mayer]

Hi,

well, where to start here ?

1. Alpha-Beta
that changes the branching factor from 40 to something like 7...
2. Null-Move
and the branching factor got down from 7 to something around 3...
3. Hashtable
I think the difference of having hashtables or not is also around 100 Elo, so quite near to nullmove
4. Eval
first Quarks had a very strange eval, once I did only work on eval (I believe it was just after my implementation of null-move) and I gained also about 100 Elo here... so you may say that 2-4 is more or less in strength gain the same
5. speed improvements
move generator, check detection etc. gets here in mind. Since the beginning of Quark I have doubled the speed here for sure... but since around version 1.76 or so I have started to use every % I gained in speed to put it in the eval. So since then Quarks nps haven't changed.

But of course you can't see anything as single, it is always the combination of it all that makes an engine strong or not so strong.

Greets, Thomas

[YvesLejeail]

Hi!
Better code structure for me, I recently implemented MakeMove and UnMakeMove functions, instead at Copying the whole board in a tmp array in order to Copy it back after the search, so that the code seems to have less overhead now !!!
Yves