AHEM

With the 0.6 release out the door, AHEM is now a very capable Morabaraba engine, and is also reasonably usable. I now need to consider what to do next. There are three categories of endeavour:

Engine Enhancements

Improve the playing strength - there are still lots of possibilities to consider:

• Fine-tune evaluation weightings (which are a bit arbitrary at the moment) - would require some kind of automatic playoff tool to verify improvements
• Build an opening book using drop-out expansion - I think this would probably improve the quality of the first few moves significantly, given a few months' calculation
• Enhance the search using something like PVS
• Knowledge improvements would probably help significantly, but I really need some input from expert players

GUI Enhancements

Over the Easter weekend, I've had some more time to put into AHEM (Adam's Happy Electronic Morabaraba), and it's shaping up nicely. I've made some serious improvements to the engine, including:

• improved quiescence
• transposition tables
• killer heuristic
• null-move proving
• knowledge enhancements
• Used the Intel C Compiler to build the DLL which ships with the GUI - this on its own brings a significant speed boost

Also a key bugfix which was impairing the search in key positions. All in all, the current unreleased code makes AHEM 0.5 look like a beginner, performing deeper, faster and smarter searches. I was planning on adding a bunch of UI features for release 0.6 but I'm tempted to just bundle up these engine enhancements and ship it - the engine is really beginning to look strong, like something that might actually not be embarrassed by competition!

Excited by progress on the new Lazarus-based GUI, I've decided to make a prerelease of AHEM version 0.5 so that all of those who've been waiting for the new GUI can take a peek. You can download the Windows prerelease here - just unzip the files and run ahemgui.exe. The following items still remain before 0.5 is officially released:

• Implementation of the "machine gunning" rule
• Visual representation of cows in hand during first phase (slightly irritating in the prerelease)
• Selection of skill levels in the GUI
• Engine shared library and GUI binaries for Linux

The prerelease already contains the best Morabaraba engine I've ever released. This version can also be compiled (without any source code changes) by GCC, MSVC and the Intel C Compiler, increasing performance and removing the Cygwin dependency.