For more than a year, Nakshatra has been more or less actively playing rated suicide chess on FICS and it has constantly improved in strength through versions 0.0 to 0.5. This is the rating chart for the year 2010.
It was quite a remarkable journey through the first half of 2010 - when the rating improvement was really big. However, it plateaued out towards the end of the year and the trend has continued into 2011 as well as you can see from the graph below:
Sometimes, its quite disappointing to see that there hasn't really been much rating improvement over the last one year or so... My goal was to get it into 2700+ league but I have not even crossed 2400 yet. Some milestones such as an improved opening book, mobility factor experiments and an integrated EGTB have not been accomplished though I have been blabbering about it since forever... Unfortunately, it looks like I will not be able to spend much time on it in the forseeable future :-( (may be its time to open source and attract some developers). And of course, "the law of diminishing returns" has started biting in (a lot more effort is now required for small improvements).
However, one really awesome thing that happened today - and the reason I actually started writing this post - is that Nakshatra has finally gone multi-variant! Ok... it has had the standard chess code for a while but I never dared to enable it on FICS for the fear of being bashed up black and blue (what will it do to Nakshatra's confidence? ;-) ). But after finally ironing out some nasty little bugs yesterday night, I finally got around to getting it play some unrated blitz matches of 5 minutes+. Astonishingly enough, it won a lot of these matches and I was pleasantly surprised. With curiosity surging, I had to then enable rated blitz matches and it went on to win 2 out of 4 matches it played! (one win against a 1500+ rated human player made my day!).
Now the real deal is that Nakshatra's standard chess capability is quite dismal - which is why I was quite surprised by the wins. Hardly any work has been done to improve the strength of standard play (its more like pre-0.0 suicide code). There is hardly any opening book. Having a rather large opening book is quite important in normal chess in my opinion. And the evaluation logic is so crappy that I am ashamed of it. But it still plays legal chess and at times, when you are not looking, it gets you by the balls...!
