Re: [Gnushogi-devel] [PATCH] my configure.ac patch

[h . g . muller]

>
> Well, I'm a poor player myself, and unfortunatly so is gnushogi those
> days - that's however somewhat unrelated, as I have not yet started to dive
> into this, and focussed my work on the "shell" around the AI till now:
> help is more than welcomed, and if you find an itch of your own, or that
> something listed in TODO seems worthy to you, I'll be glad to take more
> patches :)
>

It is true that the current GNU Shogi is weak, but the program I was
comparing it with, my own engine Shokidoki, turns out to be much stronger
than I thought. I played it (under the name Tori) on the Floodgate server,
and it received a 'rate24' of 1950 there (this is supposed to be
comparable to Shogi Club 24 human ratings, where it would mean a good
2-Dan). This was only 100 points below the well-known engine SPEAR, which
I also played there (albeit with ponder off and single-CPU), which is
crammed with hundreds of megabytes of knowledge in the form of patterns
and opening books.

Anyway, to do all this I had to develop an adapter to connect to
Floodgate, which uses the enhanced CSA protocol that is also used in the
yearly World Computer Shogi Championship. I implemented that adapter as an
XBoard pseudo-engine, so that it can in principle be used to connect any
engine through XBoard to Floodgate, or participate with it in the WCSC. I
will probably open the source of that adapter.

H.G.