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1.1 root 1: GNU CHESS HISTORY
2: (#include "../version.h")
3:
4: August 1, 1989 -- Jay Scott
5: He proofread the opening book and made
6: corrections.
7:
8: June 21, 1989 -- Hes @log-se.sv
9: He contributed new move generation routines (move.c move.h) to speedup
10: move generation and the overall program, by about 15-30%
11:
12: June 9, 1989 -- Tim Radzy ([email protected])
13: He fixed a bug in xchess/board.c. In a post-game new-game situation,
14: castling wouldn't be permitted under circumstances. Tim made
15: it possible to castle again.
16:
17: May 12, 1989 -- Joe Garbarini (garbarini%[email protected])
18: Recommended changes to documentation vis a vis chesstool usage.
19:
20: May 5, 1989 -- Jouko Holopainen ([email protected])
21: Wrote code to support underpromotion.
22: Changed interface to accept ECO/Informator style moves.
23:
24: April 30, 1989 -- Various GNU contributors
25: setlinebuf() modification for xchess/chesstool.
26: check for zero division in time printout.
27:
28: January 17, 1989 -- Anders Thulin
29: Provided extensive addition to the opening book for his
30: favorite opening the Vienna Game. This was drawn from ECO.
31:
32: November 23, 1988 -- Stuart Cracraft
33: Installed new version of Xchess that is better debugged, works on
34: the next version of X. Thanks to Wayne Christopher and Arturo Perez.
35:
36: August 28, 1988 -- Stuart Cracraft
37: Removed a sacrifice line from the Giuoco Piano entry in the opening
38: book; the program didn't seem to like the positions it got from this line.
39:
40: December 30, 1987 -- John Stanback
41: Wrote a short blurb on the heuristics contained in GNU Chess. It resides
42: in the subdirectory DOCUMENTATION as the file HEURISTICS.
43:
44: December 17, 1987 -- John Stanback
45: Modified criteria for positional evaluation in quiescence search
46: to include positions in which the estimated score lies within
47: the alpha-beta window; fixed a bug in the king proximity to pawns heuristic;
48: fixed a bug involving passed pawn heuristics;
49:
50: December 16, 1987 -- Stuart Cracraft
51: Added automatic 'list' upon exit (both in display, non-display, and
52: chesstool mode); command-line setting of tournament time controls
53: bug fixed.
54:
55: December 14, 1987 -- John Stanback
56: GNU defeated the commercial product 'Fidelity Excellence' 5.5-4.5 in
57: a 10-game match. It was running at about 500 nodes per second (typical
58: of its speed on a VAX 8650) and this would indicate its strength
59: would be about USCF 1875-1900.
60:
61: December 4, 1987 -- John Stanback
62: Man page added. Command line arguments now specify regular clock
63: settings if so desired (useful for SUN players). Thinking
64: on opponent's time is now disabled by default. Estimated
65: rating is 1850 at 500 nodes per second.
66:
67: October 20, 1987 -- Stuart Cracraft
68: Fixed GNU/SUN interaction. Chesstool and its features now
69: seem to fully work.
70:
71: October 5, 1987 -- Ken Thompson
72: GNU beat Belle (actually drew due to a bug, but
73: Ken kept GNU playing through to the win) while
74: running on a Cray XMP-48. In this 3-1 time handicap game
75: Belle outsearched Cray GNU by 10-1 (even with the handicap).
76:
77: September 26, 1987 -- John Stanback at HP
78: Hash table functioning. Thinking on opponent's
79: time functioning.
80:
81: August 20, 1987 -- Mike Meyer at Berkeley
82: Mike ran GNU Chess on a Cray 1 supercomputer.
83: The system was very heavily loaded, so the
84: program was not as speedy as with the Cray below.
85:
86: August 16, 1987 -- David Goldberg at SUN
87: He added "chesstool" support so that this
88: version of GNU Chess can run under the
89: display manager "chesstool".
90:
91: August 15, 1987 -- John Stanback at HP
92: Hash tables, more heuristics, a modified
93: search which is more efficient. He also
94: discovered a bug in the piece-exchanger. This
95: would cause the program to exchange pieces suboptimally.
96: With this fix, the program should play much
97: more strongly.
98:
99: August 13, 1987 -- Ken Thompson at Bell Labs
100: Ken ran GNU Chess on a Cray XMP supercomputer
101: (among other processors). The program got
102: about 3000-4000 chess positions per second
103: which is comprable to today's fastest bit-slice
104: commercial machines. Also, he had GNU Chess
105: play two games against Belle.
106:
107: July 19, 1987 -- Jay Scott & John Stanback
108: Many positional heuristics have been added.
109:
110: July 18, 1987 -- Stuart Cracraft
111: Improvements have been made to the opening
112: book. It is mostly an MCO book, containing
113: major variations from many of the major openings
114: and particularly in-depth on Sicilian.
115:
116: May 11, 1987 -- John Stanback at HP
117: He donated his chess program, a fairly mature
118: and strong program.
119:
120: May 1, 1987 -- Stuart Cracraft
121: He added several bug fixes various people
122: had reported. He also changed makemove() so that
123: the calling syntax is makemove(movelist,index,board)
124: rather than makemove(move,board). Having the latter
125: tickled a bug in at least one manufacturer's C-compiler,
126: so rather than write fancy code, we simplified it.
127:
128: April 25, 1987-- Jim Aspnes at MIT
129: He added all sorts of useful capabilities,
130: including positional evaluation in the tree
131: search using a table-driven algorithm,
132: modifying transposition table code in order
133: to work properly, though it doesn't improve
134: speed too much, checkmates/stalemates detected
135: in the search, en passant captures allowed,
136: detect repeated positions, iterative deepening,
137: quicker quiescence search, tournament time controls,
138: sqattacked sped up by a factor of 4, compile-time
139: debugging options.
140:
141: January 2, 1987 -- Stuart Cracraft
142: He added a few more Tal games to the collection.
143:
144: January 2, 1987 -- Jim Aspnes at MIT
145: He contributed MCO variations for the Catalan,
146: Queen's Indian, and Reti openings.
147:
148: December 29, 1986 -- Jim Aspnes at MIT
149: He contributed all MCO variations of the Najdorf
150: to the opening book. He also contributed a LISP
151: macro (written in GNU Emacs Lisp) to convert
152: xchess game formats to GNU Chess opening book
153: format.
154:
155: December 14, 1986 -- Ken Thompson at Bell Labs
156: He contributed almost 200 games by Tal to
157: our collection of Tal-games, bringing the
158: total number of Tal positions in the book
159: to 10,692. Total book positions now 13,207.
160: These reside in bookin, bookin.bdg, bookin.tal.
161: Note that presently, only bookin and bookin.tal
162: can be used. The new Tal positions came in a
163: slightly different format, which we have chosen
164: to adopt as our standard format. All book
165: games in bookin and bookin.bdg will gradually
166: change into the new standard format.
167:
168: December 11, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
169: Added "averages" for node-count per move,
170: cpu per move, rate per move to list_history
171: and write_history.
172: New version of Xchess installed.
173: Started typing in Tal games into "bookin.tal".
174: Added "total book positions" printout to "book"
175: and "enter" statistics printout.
176:
177: December 10, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
178: Implemented aspiration search in normal
179: alpha-beta search. Speedups of 3% to 40%
180: have been noticed in most positions.
181: Occasionally a slower search will result,
182: but it is thought these are worth the
183: usual speedups.
184:
185: December 9, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
186: Fixed minor bug in write_history()
187: Added another Tal game, 2nd game of 1st world
188: championship match with Botvinnik, a Benoni.
189:
190: December 9, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
191: Enhanced parallelism. All parallel processors
192: now communicate via a shared data file and
193: are kept running (in idle loops watching the
194: shared data file). This saves us a few seconds
195: on each move since the 'rsh' need not be invoked
196: more than once (at the beginning). Since the
197: shared data file is now implemented, we will
198: next work towards a "parallel anarchy" in which
199: any processor can use any other processor in
200: order to reduce its search. The current scheme
201: with the program being only as fast as its slowest
202: processor, is quite inefficient.
203:
204: December 1, 1986 -- Jim Aspnes at MIT
205: Added a couple of Master games from
206: Modern Chess Openings 12 (a Fischer game,
207: and a Matanovic game).
208:
209: November 30, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
210: Added parallelism. Can now handle multiple
211: processors (sharing same disk). Later we will
212: add the capability to use processors not sharing
213: the same disk. Modified README and MAN-PAGE.
214:
215: November 26, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
216: Fixed a few bugs in book-mailing mechanism.
217: Fixed a bug regarding situations where only
218: one move is available.
219: Fixed a bug in read_history() that caused
220: Black queenside castles to be mishandled.
221:
222: November 25, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
223: Added two pawn heuristics. Reward pawns moving into
224: a phalanx of pawns. A phalanx is two or more
225: horizontally-connected pawns. Likewise, penalize
226: pawns leaving a phalanx of pawns. The penalty for
227: leaving is a little more than the reward for
228: entering.
229:
230: November 24, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
231: A user reported an unbelievable bug. Investigation
232: of this bug led to the discovery that GNU Chess was
233: not picking the move judged best by the tree search
234: in all cases. This resulted in the bug showing
235: itself which further showed that the program was
236: selecting an inferior move. This may result in an
237: improvement to the program's play.
238:
239: November 24, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
240: Added two heuristics. Penalize king moves if
241: the king hasn't castled yet. Also, penalize pawn
242: moves which produce doubled pawns. Should
243: probably have something for isolated pawns
244: too.
245:
246: November 23, 1986 -- Wayne Christopher at Berkeley
247: New version of X chess display front-end.
248: Fixed bugs include multiple pieces, runs
249: on SUNS & Bobcats, loads saved games.
250:
251: November 23, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
252: Cleaned up some minor bugs regarding history.
253: Added "Illegal command" error message at Wayne's
254: request.
255:
256: November 22, 1986 -- David Goldberg at SUN Microsystems
257: He complained that GNU Chess was memory-hungry.
258: A few minor modifications to hash.c reduced
259: uninitialized data space 87% and text space
260: 12%. This should make it easier for GNU Chess
261: to run on small computers.
262:
263: November 22, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
264: "read" command was working, but needed
265: additional tweaking so that history
266: array would be printed by list_history().
267:
268: November 19, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
269: Added "read" command which reads a history
270: file (game listing) and restores the board
271: to as if the person was still playing that.
272: particular game. Generally cleaned up
273: history mechanism, made it more orthogonal.
274: Revised README. Added doc to MAN-PAGE.
275:
276: November 16, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
277: More opening book bugs found and fixed.
278: Added capability to accept abbreviated-algebraic notation
279: for entering "book" games from files.
280: Added approximately 2500 new positions to
281: opening book from games involving the
282: opening called Blackmar-Diemer Gambit,
283: a hoary line developed by Diemer in
284: Germany years ago.
285:
286: November 15, 1986 -- Wayne Christopher at Berkeley
287: He modified the move generator, resulting in
288: a 28% speedup.
289:
290: November 14, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
291: He documented a lot of the GNU Chess modules
292: with brief comments for each function. More
293: extensive internal documentation may go in
294: later.
295:
296: November 14, 1986 -- Wayne Christopher at Berkeley
297: He created the Xchess interface for
298: GNU Chess to have windowing with X windows.
299:
300: November 14, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
301: He added a "randomization" feature to
302: the opening book. This will cause the
303: program to select randomly from alternate
304: variations whenever -DBEST is removed
305: from Makefile's CFLAGS. If this is not
306: removed, the opening play selects the
307: first move found in the book as it appears
308: "in order" in the human-readable book.
309:
310: November 14, 1986 -- David Goldberg at SUN Microsystems
311: He responded to a query about dbm(3) which
312: eventually resulted in the fixing of a subtle
313: bug in the book code which was causing the
314: program to sometimes hash to the incorrect
315: address and thereby produce a book move which
316: didn't even exist in the book. Thanks David!
317:
318: November 14, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
319: He added the "oboard" routine in util.c. This
320: is the reverse of the already extant "iboard"
321: (same module). These two routines translate
322: between GNU Chess internal format and
323: Forsythe notation.
324:
325: November 10, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
326: He added the "enter" command. This causes
327: the current game to be entered in the book.
328: Then, GNU Chess tries to mail this new entry
329: to the book maintainers (for inclusion in
330: the master copy of the book).
331:
332: November 9, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
333: He added code for an opening book. MAN-PAGE
334: and README were modified accordingly.
335:
336: November 8, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
337: Checks and mates are now noticed at ply-1.
338: This is a more complete fix to the Oct 31 fix.
339:
340: October 31, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
341: First attempt at fix to bug which causes
342: program to check human's king when program
343: itself is in check.
344:
345: October 31, 1986 -- Mly at MIT
346: Reported a bug which caused program to crash
347: when an illegal human move was played. Fixed.
348: Also, program was unable to play as White. Fixed.
349:
350: October 22, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
351: Pps now rewards moves which liberate bishops.
352:
353: October 19, 1986 -- Stuart Cracraft
354: Added bitmapper routines to distribution.
355: Added version notice.
356:
357: October 19, 1986 -- David Goldberg at SUN Microsystems
358: Interfaced GNU Chess with SUN's chesstool.
359:
360: October 18, 1986 -- Initial release date.
361:
362:
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