With a Little Help from My Friends

It must be chess programming season again. We’ve been progressing by leaps and bounds.

Doug schooled me, yet again, in object oriented programming. He split the search class into a base class and an MTD(f) sub-class. This makes for a much cleaner design (by separating the search framework from the actual search engine) and also gives us a nice way to add more implementations of different search engines (and even switch between them at runtime!). Following Doug’s lead, I split the board class into a base class (which includes board representation and move generation) and a heuristic sub-class (which includes current state evaluation).

A couple of days later, Dillon schooled me, yet again, in chess strategy. He explained the concept of tempo. That, combined with Sam’s dirty trick of hard-coding values into arrays, allowed me to quickly implement tempo evaluation as a method of the heuristic sub-class. And GRAY MATTER no longer does the Happy King Shuffle Dance™.

In other news, we’ve just committed our 1000th revision. Thanks for everything, guys. A celebration is in order. You’ve earned it.