Sam has closed his piano and gone to bed ... now we can talk about the real stuff of life ... love, liberty and games such as Janus, Capablanca Random, Embassy Chess & the odd mention of other 10x8 variants is welcome too
For posting: - invitations to games (you can also use the New Game menu or for particular games: Janus; Capablanca Random; or Embassy) - information about upcoming tournaments - disussion of games (please limit this to completed games or discussion on how a game has arrived at a certain position ... speculation on who has an advantage or the benefits of potential moves is not permitted while that particular game is in progress) - links to interesting related sites (non-promotional)
Beren the 32nd: well, I posted following to one interested person:
well, because of series of attacks against my SMIRF project in some fora I decided to no longer publish my web site as it has been done. May be it would be redesigned as a closed shop site providing special users with access rights. But at this moment it has been closed and redirected to:
OCTOPUS is proceeding very slowly. I have not that much time and motivation. Moreover I am actually rethinking a combinatoric and recursive TSP solution covering more than 30 points in all symmetric and even strange cases.
Octopus will have a different floating piece evaluation depending on the average of empty squares and two parts of constant individual piece values: a static part and another part related to the board's emptiness.
It seems as if there would be a UCI engine first, which then would be not at all Mac specific, that is, it could be compiled for PC, too. But because I do not want to publish it because of missing 10x8 supporting GUIs, there might be the chance of releasing it to some selected testers then.
(It will need to also write an own 10x8 / 8x8 UCI GUI later what I will do for the Mac then.)
There would be a note then at that blog how to contact me for participation. But I am unsure, whether that could happen still in 2007.
Moreover I currently do no longer provide English translated pages at the web, because no English speaking chess pro- grammer had followed my bilingual approach all that time.
SMIRF Engine: Thank you for this detailed news, and good luck with Octopus. I think quite a few people here will be interested if you give us an occasional update on how it is going. All the best!