Nakshatra achieved yet another milestone by crossing 2300 rating points on FICS today! v0.3 had some major improvements over v0.2, the most important ones being the replacement of AlphaBeta with NegaScout algorithm for search, revamp of transposition table for better utilization of available space and some nasty tree pruning bug fixes. Cumulatively, these improvements led to an average of 100+ rating points improvement. The best part is that Nak managed to defeat two of the best active suicide engines on FICS - stayalive (2500+) and Plnik (2400+) in at least a couple of matches!
My goal now is to make Nakshatra the strongest suicide engine on FICS. Currently it is at #3 among the active suicide engines and probably much lower ranked if we take into consideration the inactive ones. Going further, Nakshatra will definitely require a bigger opening book (as I found that despite Nak's strength, it does play some losing opening lines occasionally!) and possibly an EGTB. Even the evaluation heuristics are in dire need of my attention as the one in v0.3 is almost the same as the one in v0.0! But testing changes in evaluation is rather tedious! I have also been experimenting with some new algorithms like forced line search; and though I am excited about this, I am not yet convinced that it could lead to a measurable improvement in the strength of the engine.
