[Info] A new approach

After having spent about 20 hours the last week trying to tweak Mediocre into becoming atleast a tiny bit better I suddenly had an epiphany and gave up.

It's been far too long since I last worked with this and there are so many things going on that I have no idea if they help or hurt.

So I scrapped the entire search function and started over...

Currently Mediocre 1.0 beta searches about 4-5 ply on average and gets beaten to scraps by v0.34. :) So far I've implemented quiescence search and transposition tables, and pretty much nothing else, not even rudimentary move ordering.

In doing so I've noticed that something is not well with how I handle transposition scores. For example I've been returning alpha/beta scores from the table rather than the actual alpha/beta in the node. This seems very wrong.

There's also something fishy going on with the hash move, but I'm not sure if this is true for v0.34 (there might be something fixing it along the way).

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Anyway, I'm having fun, and the improvements come in 100 rating chunks again. My favorite kind of improvement. :)

Let's see if it ends up surpassing v0.34 eventually. I certainly hope so.

Edit:

First non-loss for the new engine! :)

   Engine            Score
1: Mediocre v0.34    19,5/20
2: Mediocre 1.0 beta  0,5/20