Thursday, November 18, 2004

Stumbled on Jose's Secret

Jose doesn't actually play chess! It uses crafty (a freeware chess engine that is the best free chess engine out there judging by fifth place showing in the WCCC) The interface to crafty isn't ideal, but it shouldn't be too hard. When I discovered this I had halved to time it took for me to analyze moves, but it was easily becoming apparent that I didn't know the least bit about how to actually do it. When I went looking in the source for Jose I couldn't find any logic, but I stumbled on a comment about converting representations from Jose to Crafty. A few minutes later and Google had found me the link that I needed. Then I simply found the crafty.exe and it was confirmed. So now I think I will ditch my plans for improving my pathetic chess engine. I was further convinced of my move when I stumbled on this page about chess tree searching algorithms. I hardly understand what they are talking about! Interfacing with Crafty it is!!!

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