New Engine: Freda

[shaunihowe]

Hello All,

Just here to announce that I have just committed a rewrite of my Puca chess engine to GitHub. It has been years since I was last involved with computer chess but now I am back .

Here are the details...

Freda 0.9:
I still need to implement time controls so it is currently fixed at 15 to 40 ms per move. It is probably not worth testing in longer time controls so let's stick to blitz only.

https://GitHub.com/shaunihowe/freda

Any help with testing would be appreciated so I can progress to version 1.0.

I also intend to use this engine to experiment with alternative search methods such as MCTS.

[Gabor Szots]

Hello All,

Just here to announce that I have just committed a rewrite of my Puca chess engine to GitHub. It has been years since I was last involved with computer chess but now I am back .

Here are the details...

Freda 0.9:
I still need to implement time controls so it is currently fixed at 15 to 40 ms per move. It is probably not worth testing in longer time controls so let's stick to blitz only.

https://GitHub.com/shaunihowe/freda

Any help with testing would be appreciated so I can progress to version 1.0.

I also intend to use this engine to experiment with alternative search methods such as MCTS.

Hi Shaun,

Good to have a new engine appear on the horizon.

Still, I am going to wait for you to implement time controls until I test it.
BTW, even CCRL blitz tc is very much longer than the tc you use (100 moves is at most 4 s for you while our blitz games of 100 moves will take almost 4 minutes).

PS. I suggest placing releases under 'Releases' which I will now follow.

[shaunihowe]

Ok thanks,

I will try and get time control support added over the weekend, will release as version 0.99 once done.

[Gabor Szots]

I will try and get time control support added over the weekend, will release as version 0.99 once done.

If possible do it so that it accepts incremental time even if the values are not whole seconds, e.g. 1.6 s + 0.8 s.

And it would be welcomed if you could give a srength assessment as well.

[shaunihowe]

Finally got around to adding time control support, I have published a release on github and the estimated rating is somewhere between 1800 and 1900.

[Gabor Szots]

Finally got around to adding time control support, I have published a release on github and the estimated rating is somewhere between 1800 and 1900.

Splendid! Downloaded, will start a tournament tomorrow so that it can reach next week's blitz update.

[Gabor Szots]

It seems hash table is fixed at some low value, is that true? Anyway, gauntlet is in progress.

[shaunihowe]

Thanks, I look forward to the results.

Yes the hash is currently set to a fixed 16mb, I do intend to adjust this.

[Gabor Szots]

BTW, I'm sure your 1800-1900 estimation is off the mark, I'm sure it will be above 2000. We'll see.