It’s been a couple of years since the last releases of my chess programs. I’m happy to announce that I’ve recently resumed work on both and have prepared new releases! As always, they can be downloaded from their prospective Github repos:

Prophet – https://github.com/jswaff/prophet

chess4j – https://github.com/jswaff/chess4j

Prophet 4.4 is mainly a maintenance release. I’ve updated the build system from make to cmake, and done some code cleanup.

chess4j received some dependency updates and code refactoring as well, but there is a new feature I’m very excited about. chess4j is capable of utilizing a neural network! When enabled, a neural network model is used for evaluation. The net is a Pytorch model produced by a new Python project, chess-trainer . This work has a long way to go though, so for now I’ll just keep it as an “alpha feature” that is under development, but definitely in the pipeline. I’ll write more about this as it continues to mature.