Greetings, and a new engine

[johnwbyrd]

Greetings all. I'm very new at chess programming, having only completed my first engine called Superpawn. The engine is a bit of a toy, but it seems to play a mostly legal game of chess. Playing strength seems to be about the level of the Tarrasch Toy Engine or Tom's Simple Chess Program -- it's nothing to write home about by any means, but it was great fun to get working.

One thing that was useful from the beginning was to get a multi-platform build working, along with a test suite for running the engine up against a set of other pre-existing chess engines. This shook out a multitude of silly bugs in the development process.

In any case, I want to say hello to Bob Hyatt, who (even though we have not met) was very helpful to me virtually through his years of posting his thoughts on Internet forums such as this one. Additionally, the Computer Chess wiki was extremely helpful.

Interestingly, I'm particularly bad at chess, and thus I can't really justify why I've had so much fun writing a chess engine. Perhaps I wanted to have a bit of software to accomplish things I couldn't do myself.

http://chess.johnbyrd.org

[daz12]

John well done !

I am starting out and hopefully in months perhaps a year I hope to have something that works myself.

I well check out your engine in spare time.

Best

Daz

[Toadofsky]

Well done! I quite enjoyed the engine description as well!

Your web page mentions EloStat. I have a Stockfish fork which I'd like to test at a variety of settings, to determine its "Elo" rating. Any advice you can provide would be greatly appreciated.