At long last, Prophet 5.2 is released! Development has been quiet for a while as I was settling into a new job and dealing with other commitments, but I’ve managed to finally get this one over the line. Nothing earth shattering, but a couple of nice improvements:

• The neural network has been improved. I haven’t changed the architecture from the last release, but the quality of the training data has improved. I’m training off approximately 200m positions, each searched to a depth of 5 (+quiescence). The position at the end of the principal variation is then scored using a 35k fixed node search.
• I finally have a Native WIndows build! This has been a challenge for me, as I don’t typically do development work on Windows.

My testing shows Prophet 5.2 to be about +33 elo over 5.1:

ResultSet-EloRating>ratings
Rank Name              Elo    +    - games score oppo. draws 
   1 zevra-2.6         103    5    5 16066   62%    16   16% 
   2 Tcheran-5.1        54    4    4 16064   55%    19   31% 
   3 prophet-5.2        33    3    3 38400   51%    24   30% 
   4 casacnchess-0.9    27    4    4 16065   51%    20   36% 
   5 aramis-1.4.0       27    4    4 16064   51%    20   30% 
   6 Lux-4.2            20    5    5 16064   50%    21   27% 
   7 lishex-1.1.1        7    5    5 16066   48%    22   27% 
   8 prophet-5.1         0    3    3 34117   47%    24   26% 
   9 Supernova-2.4     -10    5    5 16064   45%    23   21% 
  10 drosophila-1.6    -32    5    5 16064   42%    24   25% 

Other thoughts: in my day job, we are leaning more and more into AI driven development. The tool of choice at work is Claude Code. I’ve also dabbled with Codex. I used Codex to help with the compatibility issues in getting an MSVC build. I’ve also had both Claude and Codex do an analysis of the codebase to suggest spreed imrpovements, mainly out of curiosity; I wanted to compare the quality of the suggestions. (I haven’t actioned any of those suggestions yet.) The question now is- do I really want to use AI tools?

I’ve put a lot of thought into this actually, and I’ve decided not to leverage AI tools for Prophet, or at least not for anything that changes the engine’s behavior (e.g. algorithmic). As stated above, Codex did help produce an MSVC build. However, this is a creative endeavor for me, and part of the joy of it is “staying close to the code.” I also think it’s a little unfair perhaps to use AI tools and then enter the program into competition.

However, chess4j, my Java program, isn’t meant to be competitive. It’s just a learning testbed. I WILL use AI tools to improve chess4j. That gives an opportunity to experiment with the latest AI coding agents without feeling as though I’m cheating when entering into a competition.

In short- no AI coding agents to improve Prophet’s playing strength. Yes to AI coding for chess4j.