I’m happy to finally announce the next minor release of both of my chess programs! You can grab Windows and Linux binaries from the respective Github repos:
Prophet – https://github.com/jswaff/prophet
chess4j – https://github.com/jswaff/chess4j
The focus of this release was to continue to improve the evaluation. Prophet 4.3 and chess4j 5.1 have the exact same change log:
- Passed pawn by rank (was a single value)
- Non-linear mobility (was a single value)
- Knight outposts
- Trapped bishop penalty
These changes are worth about +50 ELO in Prophet (which I expect will bring it very close to the 2500 mark on the CCRL Blitz List). I attempted a “supported rook” term, meaning the rook on an open file is connected to another rook, but surprisingly it actually cost a few ELO. Seems that should work though, so I’ve left the code in place but have it commented out.
I had planned on doing some pawn and basic endgame work in this line, and perhaps I still will, but right now I feel the time is right to begin work on neural networks. I’m pausing development for a while to study the literature. Hopefully by spring I’m ready to begin the implementation.