363 lines
13 KiB
Plaintext
363 lines
13 KiB
Plaintext
GNU CHESS HISTORY
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(#include "../version.h")
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August 1, 1989 -- Jay Scott
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He proofread the opening book and made
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corrections.
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June 21, 1989 -- Hes @log-se.sv
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He contributed new move generation routines (move.c move.h) to speedup
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move generation and the overall program, by about 15-30%
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June 9, 1989 -- Tim Radzy (unet!nplab4!radz@ames.arc.nasa.gov)
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He fixed a bug in xchess/board.c. In a post-game new-game situation,
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castling wouldn't be permitted under circumstances. Tim made
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it possible to castle again.
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May 12, 1989 -- Joe Garbarini (garbarini%kegger@circus.llnl.gov)
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Recommended changes to documentation vis a vis chesstool usage.
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May 5, 1989 -- Jouko Holopainen (jhol@tolsun.oulu.fi)
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Wrote code to support underpromotion.
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Changed interface to accept ECO/Informator style moves.
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April 30, 1989 -- Various GNU contributors
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setlinebuf() modification for xchess/chesstool.
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check for zero division in time printout.
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January 17, 1989 -- Anders Thulin
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Provided extensive addition to the opening book for his
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favorite opening the Vienna Game. This was drawn from ECO.
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November 23, 1988 -- Stuart Cracraft
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Installed new version of Xchess that is better debugged, works on
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the next version of X. Thanks to Wayne Christopher and Arturo Perez.
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August 28, 1988 -- Stuart Cracraft
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Removed a sacrifice line from the Giuoco Piano entry in the opening
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book; the program didn't seem to like the positions it got from this line.
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December 30, 1987 -- John Stanback
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Wrote a short blurb on the heuristics contained in GNU Chess. It resides
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in the subdirectory DOCUMENTATION as the file HEURISTICS.
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December 17, 1987 -- John Stanback
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Modified criteria for positional evaluation in quiescence search
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to include positions in which the estimated score lies within
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the alpha-beta window; fixed a bug in the king proximity to pawns heuristic;
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fixed a bug involving passed pawn heuristics;
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December 16, 1987 -- Stuart Cracraft
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Added automatic 'list' upon exit (both in display, non-display, and
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chesstool mode); command-line setting of tournament time controls
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bug fixed.
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December 14, 1987 -- John Stanback
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GNU defeated the commercial product 'Fidelity Excellence' 5.5-4.5 in
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a 10-game match. It was running at about 500 nodes per second (typical
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of its speed on a VAX 8650) and this would indicate its strength
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would be about USCF 1875-1900.
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December 4, 1987 -- John Stanback
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Man page added. Command line arguments now specify regular clock
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settings if so desired (useful for SUN players). Thinking
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on opponent's time is now disabled by default. Estimated
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rating is 1850 at 500 nodes per second.
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October 20, 1987 -- Stuart Cracraft
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Fixed GNU/SUN interaction. Chesstool and its features now
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seem to fully work.
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October 5, 1987 -- Ken Thompson
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GNU beat Belle (actually drew due to a bug, but
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Ken kept GNU playing through to the win) while
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running on a Cray XMP-48. In this 3-1 time handicap game
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Belle outsearched Cray GNU by 10-1 (even with the handicap).
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September 26, 1987 -- John Stanback at HP
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Hash table functioning. Thinking on opponent's
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time functioning.
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August 20, 1987 -- Mike Meyer at Berkeley
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Mike ran GNU Chess on a Cray 1 supercomputer.
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The system was very heavily loaded, so the
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program was not as speedy as with the Cray below.
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August 16, 1987 -- David Goldberg at SUN
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He added "chesstool" support so that this
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version of GNU Chess can run under the
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display manager "chesstool".
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August 15, 1987 -- John Stanback at HP
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Hash tables, more heuristics, a modified
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search which is more efficient. He also
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discovered a bug in the piece-exchanger. This
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would cause the program to exchange pieces suboptimally.
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With this fix, the program should play much
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more strongly.
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August 13, 1987 -- Ken Thompson at Bell Labs
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Ken ran GNU Chess on a Cray XMP supercomputer
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(among other processors). The program got
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about 3000-4000 chess positions per second
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which is comprable to today's fastest bit-slice
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commercial machines. Also, he had GNU Chess
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play two games against Belle.
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July 19, 1987 -- Jay Scott & John Stanback
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Many positional heuristics have been added.
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July 18, 1987 -- Stuart Cracraft
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Improvements have been made to the opening
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book. It is mostly an MCO book, containing
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major variations from many of the major openings
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and particularly in-depth on Sicilian.
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May 11, 1987 -- John Stanback at HP
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He donated his chess program, a fairly mature
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and strong program.
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May 1, 1987 -- Stuart Cracraft
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He added several bug fixes various people
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had reported. He also changed makemove() so that
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the calling syntax is makemove(movelist,index,board)
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rather than makemove(move,board). Having the latter
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tickled a bug in at least one manufacturer's C-compiler,
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so rather than write fancy code, we simplified it.
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April 25, 1987-- Jim Aspnes at MIT
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He added all sorts of useful capabilities,
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including positional evaluation in the tree
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search using a table-driven algorithm,
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modifying transposition table code in order
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to work properly, though it doesn't improve
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speed too much, checkmates/stalemates detected
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in the search, en passant captures allowed,
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detect repeated positions, iterative deepening,
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quicker quiescence search, tournament time controls,
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sqattacked sped up by a factor of 4, compile-time
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debugging options.
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January 2, 1987 -- Stuart Cracraft
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He added a few more Tal games to the collection.
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January 2, 1987 -- Jim Aspnes at MIT
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He contributed MCO variations for the Catalan,
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Queen's Indian, and Reti openings.
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December 29, 1986 -- Jim Aspnes at MIT
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He contributed all MCO variations of the Najdorf
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to the opening book. He also contributed a LISP
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macro (written in GNU Emacs Lisp) to convert
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xchess game formats to GNU Chess opening book
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format.
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December 14, 1986 -- Ken Thompson at Bell Labs
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He contributed almost 200 games by Tal to
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our collection of Tal-games, bringing the
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total number of Tal positions in the book
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to 10,692. Total book positions now 13,207.
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These reside in bookin, bookin.bdg, bookin.tal.
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Note that presently, only bookin and bookin.tal
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can be used. The new Tal positions came in a
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slightly different format, which we have chosen
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to adopt as our standard format. All book
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games in bookin and bookin.bdg will gradually
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change into the new standard format.
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December 11, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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Added "averages" for node-count per move,
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cpu per move, rate per move to list_history
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and write_history.
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New version of Xchess installed.
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Started typing in Tal games into "bookin.tal".
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Added "total book positions" printout to "book"
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and "enter" statistics printout.
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December 10, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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Implemented aspiration search in normal
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alpha-beta search. Speedups of 3% to 40%
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have been noticed in most positions.
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Occasionally a slower search will result,
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but it is thought these are worth the
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usual speedups.
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December 9, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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Fixed minor bug in write_history()
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Added another Tal game, 2nd game of 1st world
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championship match with Botvinnik, a Benoni.
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December 9, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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Enhanced parallelism. All parallel processors
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now communicate via a shared data file and
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are kept running (in idle loops watching the
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shared data file). This saves us a few seconds
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on each move since the 'rsh' need not be invoked
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more than once (at the beginning). Since the
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shared data file is now implemented, we will
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next work towards a "parallel anarchy" in which
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any processor can use any other processor in
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order to reduce its search. The current scheme
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with the program being only as fast as its slowest
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processor, is quite inefficient.
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December 1, 1986 -- Jim Aspnes at MIT
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Added a couple of Master games from
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Modern Chess Openings 12 (a Fischer game,
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and a Matanovic game).
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November 30, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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Added parallelism. Can now handle multiple
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processors (sharing same disk). Later we will
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add the capability to use processors not sharing
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the same disk. Modified README and MAN-PAGE.
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November 26, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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Fixed a few bugs in book-mailing mechanism.
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Fixed a bug regarding situations where only
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one move is available.
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Fixed a bug in read_history() that caused
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Black queenside castles to be mishandled.
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November 25, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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Added two pawn heuristics. Reward pawns moving into
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a phalanx of pawns. A phalanx is two or more
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horizontally-connected pawns. Likewise, penalize
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pawns leaving a phalanx of pawns. The penalty for
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leaving is a little more than the reward for
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entering.
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November 24, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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A user reported an unbelievable bug. Investigation
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of this bug led to the discovery that GNU Chess was
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not picking the move judged best by the tree search
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in all cases. This resulted in the bug showing
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itself which further showed that the program was
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selecting an inferior move. This may result in an
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improvement to the program's play.
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November 24, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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Added two heuristics. Penalize king moves if
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the king hasn't castled yet. Also, penalize pawn
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moves which produce doubled pawns. Should
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probably have something for isolated pawns
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too.
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November 23, 1986 -- Wayne Christopher at Berkeley
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New version of X chess display front-end.
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Fixed bugs include multiple pieces, runs
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on SUNS & Bobcats, loads saved games.
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November 23, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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Cleaned up some minor bugs regarding history.
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Added "Illegal command" error message at Wayne's
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request.
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November 22, 1986 -- David Goldberg at SUN Microsystems
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He complained that GNU Chess was memory-hungry.
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A few minor modifications to hash.c reduced
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uninitialized data space 87% and text space
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12%. This should make it easier for GNU Chess
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to run on small computers.
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November 22, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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"read" command was working, but needed
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additional tweaking so that history
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array would be printed by list_history().
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November 19, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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Added "read" command which reads a history
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file (game listing) and restores the board
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to as if the person was still playing that.
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particular game. Generally cleaned up
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history mechanism, made it more orthogonal.
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Revised README. Added doc to MAN-PAGE.
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November 16, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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More opening book bugs found and fixed.
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Added capability to accept abbreviated-algebraic notation
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for entering "book" games from files.
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Added approximately 2500 new positions to
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opening book from games involving the
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opening called Blackmar-Diemer Gambit,
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a hoary line developed by Diemer in
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Germany years ago.
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November 15, 1986 -- Wayne Christopher at Berkeley
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He modified the move generator, resulting in
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a 28% speedup.
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November 14, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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He documented a lot of the GNU Chess modules
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with brief comments for each function. More
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extensive internal documentation may go in
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later.
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November 14, 1986 -- Wayne Christopher at Berkeley
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He created the Xchess interface for
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GNU Chess to have windowing with X windows.
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November 14, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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He added a "randomization" feature to
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the opening book. This will cause the
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program to select randomly from alternate
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variations whenever -DBEST is removed
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from Makefile's CFLAGS. If this is not
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removed, the opening play selects the
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first move found in the book as it appears
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"in order" in the human-readable book.
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November 14, 1986 -- David Goldberg at SUN Microsystems
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He responded to a query about dbm(3) which
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eventually resulted in the fixing of a subtle
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bug in the book code which was causing the
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program to sometimes hash to the incorrect
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address and thereby produce a book move which
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didn't even exist in the book. Thanks David!
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November 14, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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He added the "oboard" routine in util.c. This
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is the reverse of the already extant "iboard"
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(same module). These two routines translate
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between GNU Chess internal format and
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Forsythe notation.
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November 10, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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He added the "enter" command. This causes
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the current game to be entered in the book.
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Then, GNU Chess tries to mail this new entry
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to the book maintainers (for inclusion in
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the master copy of the book).
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November 9, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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He added code for an opening book. MAN-PAGE
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and README were modified accordingly.
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November 8, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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Checks and mates are now noticed at ply-1.
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This is a more complete fix to the Oct 31 fix.
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October 31, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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First attempt at fix to bug which causes
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program to check human's king when program
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itself is in check.
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October 31, 1986 -- Mly at MIT
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Reported a bug which caused program to crash
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when an illegal human move was played. Fixed.
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Also, program was unable to play as White. Fixed.
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October 22, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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Pps now rewards moves which liberate bishops.
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October 19, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
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Added bitmapper routines to distribution.
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Added version notice.
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October 19, 1986 -- David Goldberg at SUN Microsystems
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Interfaced GNU Chess with SUN's chesstool.
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October 18, 1986 -- Initial release date.
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