Milady 4.05b

Finally, I'm back in computer chess with a new version of Milady, 4.05b . In this version, evaluation is simple and rewritten from scratch. It takes into account material, material imbalance, king attack, passed pawn, control of cases, control of centre, development, double pawns,.. Most of all, the evaluation is smoothly normalized such that there are no jump in the evaluation. I completely removed all the cut-off based on Alpha or on Beta that were in the evaluation before. In addition, the analysis feature is improved and it can follows move input during move analysis. Framework 4 required to work.

This version reached 2270 against my Novag Star Diamond (rated 2150 international ELO). All the games can be find here. These are examples of position reached during this match :

4Nb1k/5p2/2Q4p/1p2P1p1/2bP3P/4BP2/1q4PK/8 w - - 1 50  bm hxg5; During game 3, it is white to move after a blunder from black (Qb2), there are several good moves for white but the best is hxg5, leading for instance to  1.hxg5 Bf1 2.f4 Qe2 3.Nd6 Bxd6 4.Qe8+ Kg7 5.gxh6+ Kg6 6.Qg8+ Kf5 7.Qh7+ Kg4 8.Qg7+ Kf5 9.exd6 Qxe3 10.Qg5+ Ke4 11.Qe5+ Kd3 12.Qxb5+ Ke4.  

7k/pb2q3/8/2pppBb1/6Q1/P3PN2/1PK3P1/8 b - - 1 29 bm Bh6 ; game 5 Star Diamond played here Bxe3 (maybe not a bad move, Bh6 or Bf6 may be better although). It is hard to believe for a human, but here black are lost. Mate menace, checks, will lead to win material. 

Note that in engine tournament, the strength will be lower since there are some program crash due to GUI command missing: I should investigate on that...

The program is available in the download section, where you can find the three last versions.