A Long Overdue Update

A few days ago, I compiled and ran GRAY MATTER for the first time in months if not years. Thanks to Jonne, it compiled with only two warnings (unused variables) and soundly defeated me at a few quick games. On my plate for this week: fix those two warnings, then make the transposition table a singleton.

Resurrection

After too long of a break, I’m trying to get back into GRAY MATTER. Yesterday, I improved the rook heuristics.

Jonne

A few days ago, a stranger filed an issue report. A few minutes later, he uploaded a patch that fixed the bug. I immediately added him as a team member.

The next day, he flooded my inbox with all kinds of commits: fixed this, improved that. He seems to enjoy fixing code even more than I enjoy breaking it. ;-)

And he’s no longer a stranger; he’s a friend. Let’s all welcome Jonne to The Gray Matter Team. :-)

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.

Downtime

My buddy Sam had kindly given me an account on his Linux box to test GRAY MATTER. Sadly, yesterday, someone started pounding away at his bandwidth; he had to take his box offline. He’s still trying to diagnose and solve the problem.

In the meantime, I have no way to test GRAY MATTER (without scorching my testicles). If someone has a Linux box and wouldn’t mind giving me an account to test GRAY MATTER, I’d be most grateful.

Update 1: No one was pounding away at Sam’s bandwidth. Runaway GRAY MATTER processes were pounding away at his CPU and RAM. It was my own dumb fault. He discovered the problem and got his server back online. I’m sorry for the trouble, and thanks, Sam!

Update 2: Song has given me an account on his FreeBSD box as well. Thanks, Song!

Mailing List

I’ve created a GRAY MATTER NewsGroup. It allows you to follow changes to the code online or through email. It also allows you to post questions, comments, flames, and pornography.

Automata

I haven’t had much time to work on GRAY MATTER. I’ve been working on this instead:

I’ve also codified what I humbly call Raj’s Law. For two sets, A and B:

A – B = A ∧ A ∧ B

I’ll get back to GRAY MATTER soon.

Pondering, Terminology

I’ve added two new technical documents about pondering and terminology. These are works in progress. Hit me with your questions, comments, and flames.

Technical Documents

I’d started writing a series of technical documents as posts on this blog. I’d written about perft() and alpha-beta pruning when I realized that the posts were growing too large and unwieldy. I think that these documents have a better home in the wiki. If you’d like access to change anything about the wiki (or source code), comment on this blog, email me, or IM me.

Friends Needed

One of the reasons that we’ve embarked on this project is to meet interesting people. We're looking to extend our circle of friends. These are the roles that we still need filled:

• Release Coordinator: Upon every major change to the GRAY MATTER source code (that affects its playing strength), this person will compile and upload a Windows executable. Here are the simple instructions to do this manually, but this entire process could be automated. Ideally, this person will have a box running Linux with Subversion, the GNU toolchain, and MinGW.


• Chess Player: This person will play chess against GRAY MATTER (or perhaps test GRAY MATTER on an Internet Chess Server) and provide feedback regarding its performance to its developers.

We also need developers who will contribute ideas or source code. If you’re interested in playing any of these parts, comment on this blog, email me, or IM me.

Hello, World

My name is Raj, and I’m the lead (pronounced l33t) hacker of a team that’s interested in chess. Our mission is to develop a competitive, pedagogical chess engine. And, most importantly, to have fun while doing it. On this blog, we’ll chronicle the development of our chess engine, GRAY MATTER, from girlhood, through adolescence, and into womanhood.

From the GRAY MATTER project page:

GRAY MATTER is a chess engine; it can play a game of chess. It isn’t very strong but is a good learning and teaching tool. Its authors aim to write readable, understandable, and hackable code. It’s written in C++ and employs good object-oriented practices. It uses some state-of-the-art techniques such as an MTD(f) move search and rotated BitBoards.

If you’d like to know more, comment on this blog, email me, or IM me.

P.S. First post!