Blocky v2.0.0

There have been a number of improvements made to Blocky between v1.0 and this new release. They include:

• Search
  • Reverse Futility Pruning
  • Internal Iterative Reductions
  • Late Move Pruning
• Evaluation
  • Piece Evaluation
    • Mobility (Rook, Bishop, Knight)
    • Bishop Pair
  • Pawn Evaluation
    • Passed Pawns
    • Doubled Pawns
    • Chained Pawns
    • Phalanx Pawns
• Move Ordering
  • Butterfly History Heuristic

Additionally, there were some major speedups, and existing features have been tweaked.

Results against Blocky v1.0 at time control 40s + 0.4s:

Score of Blockyv2.0.0 vs Blockyv1.0: 831 - 45 - 124  [0.893] 1000
...      Blockyv2.0.0 playing White: 431 - 18 - 51  [0.913] 500
...      Blockyv2.0.0 playing Black: 400 - 27 - 73  [0.873] 500
...      White vs Black: 458 - 418 - 124  [0.520] 1000
Elo difference: 368.6 +/- 28.8, LOS: 100.0 %, DrawRatio: 12.4 %

Testing was done using Stockfish's 8movesv3 book.

Blocky v1.0

This is the first major release of Blocky, and the following features have been implemented:

• Search:
  • Alpha-Beta Search
    • Aspiration Windows
    • Principle Variation Search
  • Quiescent Search
  • Null Move Pruning
  • Late Move Reductions
  • Transposition Tables Cutoffs
• Evaluation:
  • Tuned Piece-Square Tables
  • Tapered Evaluation
  • Mop Up Evaluation
• Move Ordering:
  • Transposition Table Moves
  • MVV-LVA
  • Killer Move Heuristic
  • Staged Move Generation
• Other Techniques:
  • Magic Bitboards and Attack Tables
  • Zobrist-Hashing

I would like to thank everyone, who can be found listed in the README, who have helped out this project. This couldn't be done alone.

One major thing to note about Blocky at this point is that the uci command stop has not been implemented yet. This is something to look forward to in future releases.