Support for time controls has been added to both Prophet and chess4j. Each is capable of playing with a fixed time per move or incremental chess clocks. They can use conventional chess clocks as well, but the timing strategy doesn’t really take into account that time will be added after the time control is up (for example 40 minutes for the first 40 moves, then 5 more minutes for each 10 moves, etc.).

Another addition that was tricky to get right was the JNI support to print changes in the principal variation during a search. I ended up adding a callback function that is invoked from the search when the PV changes at the root. When using P4 as a standalone engine, that callback would be a simple “print PV” function. When invoking the P4 search from chess4j, the callback is a method in the JNI layer that calls a similar “print PV” function in the Java code. It was tricky, but works beautifully.

I mentioned in my last post that I was kicking off some self play matches in P4 using 10 second matches with 0.5 second increments. This did uncover a couple of bugs, but everything is stable now. Unlike fixed depth matches where you would expect an exact .500 result, the timed matches will introduce a small amount of variability as the system becomes “busy” at times which will cause the search to stop at different points. So, the result of a 4000 game match was close to but not exactly 0.500.

Just out of curiosity I also played a 2000 game match of P4 vs P3. There was absolutely no doubt that P3 should win this match hands down. P4 is missing many search algorithms that are worth lots of ELO. I just wanted to test for stability and get a baseline measurement to gauge future improvements against. The result – 5 – 1959 – 36! Clearly a long way to go, but search improvements are coming soon.

Next up: analysis support, ponder support in chess4j, and a Windows build of the chess4j + P4 bundle. Once those features are complete, it will be time to start re-adding those search enhancements to climb the ELO ladder. Can’t wait.