Single Comment

I've already got a handful of those 256 meg thumb-drives, too, and I love
the direction technology is taking them.  Flashram is the wave of the
future.  Unfortunately, I have had more than my share of bad luck with
Intel systems, and the rate at which my last few PC compatibles crashed
makes me view the benchmarks and forecasts they've come up with, with
suspicion.  (It is rumored that thumbdrives rarely last more than a year
from the time you first buy them, and put them to use, hot swaps and
all.)
 Nobody is forcing you to boot up an ST emulator just to try out my code,
just bear in mind that not everybody has a computer that you consider
state of the art.

As for generating a mini-max tree, how deep should you go before you
start
pruning?  I know you recommend a 9 ply search (just under 5 full moves),
and I have nothing against that.  In an endgame consisting of four or
five
pieces, it sounds perfectly reasonable to do a 30 or 40 ply search - the
space required is far less than at start, you just have to look into the
possibility that you are revisiting a board that you've already
generated
somewhere higher up (earlier) in the tree - maybe with the tempos swapped
-
but you can save a ton of space that way.

Say, from the sample Ultima games here at www.chessvariants.org, I
wasn't
entirely sure why the players were holding back and playing 1. Pg2-g4 or
1.
Pf2-f4 (recounting from memory, I may be wrong, they were only seizing a
couple of squares of territory) instead of pushing the pawns up to the
limit possible, like 1. Pf2-f6 or 1. Pg2-g6 and let them bite the dust if
that's what it's cracked up to be.  As principles go, is it really that
dangerous to hog space - even throw pawns away - for the sake of reaching
a game that is that much more open?  In any case, whether the Leaper is
capable of single or multi-leaps, losing a Leaper is going to be the most
momentous occasion in the game.