The second reason, it’s because practice makes better. I want to became a better programmer. I have learn so much with it. I had worked so much time on it, it was like a real job. In software development,you must always learn new things if you want to stay up-to-date. Everything had started with a single game of suicide chess on FICS, I played against MarcFerrand. In his finger note, there was a note about a small software that he was looking for; a software to help him to analyze suicide chess games. That’s the way everything started. A little software for analyzing some games, with some codes of it, I started to write my own suicide chess engine. Nessegrev is his name. Nessegrev got some big problem, his opening book. While thinking to solved this problem, I was looking at others opening book : Nilatac and Sjeng’s one. The Nilatac’s one is huge, and the Sjeng’s one can be easily modified by hand. I decide to start my own opening book. My goal was to have a bigger book than Nilatac, while still being able to modify it ( not relying only on computer computation). This idea give me the motivation to program. learn new thing like algorithm and distributed computation; and to improve all programming skills.

Third reason, it’s I hate to lose my time in front of a TV. I prefer this time for something useful. Life is too short, to lose it, to somethings unproductive. I don’t say that you must always « work », I believe that having good time with family/friends is way better than wasting time in front of a boring TV show. So instead, passing a lot of hours in front of TV, I preferred to be in front of my computer programming few things. At least I felt being more useful this way. Even if want I start this project, there was very few people to thanks/encourage me, I still believe that worth the price. There’s nothing like knowing that people from around the world using your project.

Forth reason, it force to learn new personal skill like project managing, self-learner, etc. Even some tasks that I hate must be done, so I’m force to doing it. When you start a project, you are usually make what you like first, then the « less funny » part of the project. The good part of this is if you continue your project, you will develop new skills. Example: I had to learn how to install / manage a apache and a cvs server, practice my English writing , improve my web-design,etc. Never under-estimate what you can learn.

Fifth reason, looking at it right now! A huge opening book, so human and engine can use / learn from it. I discover some great people with this project. I’m still using it almost daily, and I know that I’m not alone in this case. This project hadn’t give me any money, but I can say, that now I have a good day job and this project helps me to pass interview for it.

That are the reasons why I invest so much time and money in SuicideChess. I hope I’ll keep these motivation for the future.

Each day more than 1 millions position are created. Good luck if you want to see all of them.

Thanks all of your patience, and support during this time.

It’s on this computer that the project suicidechess had start. During all those years it have done a lot of different work: hosting the database, the Website, my email client.  I also used it to program a lot.

I need just to transfer few last things before unplug it, like the CVS server. By far, it’s the most stable computer I ever got, with an average of only one downtime per year ( windows crash, electric blackout, etc ).

You won’t be forgotten…

I’ll try to limit as much as I can this interruption, it’ll be about 3-4 days (hoping so). You can always follow me on twitter(@Nettogrof or @Suicidechess), to know when the service will return.

To give you a idea, it’s about 25x the size of nilatac’s one. Currently it took about 3 seconds to compute a position. So this means that a lot of CPU time have been give to this project, but the results can be use by all.

For now, just my own suicide chess engine use it, hoping to put them back online soon.

I know that recently I didn’t add new features or update azor, I wish to be able to pass more time on it,but for now it’s hard. Hopefully it’ll be better this summer.

I’ll like to take this time, to thanks all of us, who helps me a lot with this project. Many things, features, ideas came from you to make this project a better one.

And hopefully, to make you a better player.

I was sure that my own version of sjeng will finish higher that sjeng, but I wanted to compare with others.
The tourney was a 50 games Round-robin of 1 minute with 1 second incremental.

Here the result:
Nessjeng 117.5 / 150
Wizard 94 / 150
Sjeng 87.5 / 150
Pulsar 10 / 150

All games can be download in one big .pgn file here.

What changes have I made to sjeng ?
Simply, a way better opening book. Ok, I must confess that isn’t a simple handmade opening book, I had connect a sjeng on the huge opening book of suicidechess.ca .
I got this idea several months ago, when I started to program a opening book layer of StayAlive( a wizard engine running on FICS) for Neca.
Recently for the job, I needed to do some C/C++ programming. It was my first real C/C++ program. When I looked that Sjeng source code, I saw that could be easy to connect it to the opening book database.

I knew that Sjeng and wizard have some weakness in their openings, but I didn’t tough that will be that much.

There’s a lot of better chess engine programmer than me, but many underestimate the importance of the opening. I strongly suggest to new engine programmer to invest their time in all game phase: opening, middle game and endgame. It’s true not only for the suicide variant, but for all chess variant.

Currently, i’m only under windows, so I can’t compare these engines vs linux engines. But if you know others engines to throw-in, I can easily run others tourney.

After several attempt, I wasn’t able to restore the database as it was. So I got no choice to restore the backup for the 1st of July.
That’s the saddest part, we must re-do all works of July. And I have lost all forum discussion :S

The good news now:
The opening book is back online!
Most of services (Main server, gore, azor,etc) are back online too.
My main computer (previously known as NetBombe) got replaced by a new computer (AMD Phenom II X6 1090 with 8Gb of ram) so we’ll be able to work quickly!

I’ll try to buy a new one as soon as possible, or maybe transfert everything on a other computer. It’ll takes more time than I first tought.

So for now the project is on hold, so no need to try to run a Azor, or try the opening section. Thanks to everyone who help me, I’ll keep you tune, as soon as I got more news