Morabaraba: New Engine Winning!

In spite of labouring under the disadvantage of a greatly inferior evaluation and search algorithm (including no attempt at move ordering), the new version 0.2 engine for AHEM (Adam's Happy Electronic Morabaraba) is now scoring victories against the old engine. This is attributable purely to gaining extra search depth from raw speed. As the search algorithm and eval are upgraded to the level of the v0.1 version, additional search depth gains should result. This is a tremendous vindication of the decision to go ahead and build the new move generation strategy using C. Although I was going to make further improvements to the eval and the search engine, this result fulfils my 0.2 release criterion ("better than 0.1"!). Accordingly, I'm going to take a bit of time off from engine development to package and publish the release. This means that the new movegen is complete, but the release will still have extremely naive eval (basically just material) and search (alphabeta with no effort at move ordering).

However, v0.3, which should follow shortly, will make modest algorithmic improvements which should lead to significant playing strength improvements. After that, I will change tack for a bit, working on user interfaces for a while before returning to playing strength improvements.

So AHEM is about to make a huge stride in playing strength, and is likely to go well beyond my own modest Morabaraba skills (I was already hard-pressed against the old version!). Accordingly, I would be very grateful to find some better opposition for playing test games - either strong humans or other computer programs. If you know either, please contact me! I'm also interested in setting up a computer Morabaraba tournament, and would love to hear from anyone interested in entering.