Phalanx is dead?

[sombra]

Hello, brave fellows,

Is Phalanx dead? Its former URL, www.crosswinds.net/~dobes/phalanx
does not seem to work. And the version on the FTP site
(ftp.math.muni.cz/pub/math/people/Dobes) is of 2000. It is a pity if
it is really dead, because it is a worthy player, not second to GNU
Chess. Or there is another site on the Web where it is actively
developed?

Thank ya.

[Tord Kallqvist Romstad]

somb...@ig.com.br (sombra) writes:

> Hello, brave fellows,
>
> Is Phalanx dead? Its former URL, www.crosswinds.net/~dobes/phalanx
> does not seem to work. And the version on the FTP site
> (ftp.math.muni.cz/pub/math/people/Dobes) is of 2000. It is a pity if
> it is really dead, because it is a worthy player, not second to GNU
> Chess.

I agree, it is a great program. Crafty is stronger, but I like
Phalanx better; partly because of the more clean, compact and elegant
source code, partly because of the attractive playing style.

I sent Dusan an e-mail one year ago about a bug in the king safety
evaluation. His response indicated that there is still hope of a new
version. Besides the bug I reported, he had also fixed a few other
bugs and improved the opening book.

The finger notes of Phalanx on FICS look like this:

fics% fi pikozrout

Statistics for pikozrout(C) (Last disconnected Wed Oct 17, 11:31 PDT 2001):

rating RD win loss draw total best
Blitz 2379 115.8 7685 837 871 9393 2519 (06-Jan-1998)
Standard 2346 139.9 685 203 93 981 2381 (02-Oct-2000)
Lightning 2491 114.7 711 32 35 778 2571 (09-Jun-2000)
Wild ---- 350.0 0 0 0 0
Bughouse ---- 350.0 0 0 0 0
Crazyhouse ---- 350.0 0 0 0 0
Suicide ---- 350.0 0 0 0 0

1: Phalanx XXIII, 64000 kB hashtable, 47/4718 kB P/S opening book
2: Intel Pentium-III 733, Linux, GCC version 2.95.2
3: operator and author: dusan
4: the machine is located in Brno, Czech Republic
5: Phalanx is free software. It's distributed under the GPL.
6: http://www.crosswinds.net/~dobes/phalanx/
7: ftp://ftp.math.muni.cz/pub/math/people/Dobes/

Notice that the version number is XXIII, while the last publicly
available version is XXII. It is somewhat disturbing to see that the
account has not played any games since October last year, however.

In case anybody is interested in the bug I reported last year, it is
located in line number 644 in the file static.c. This line looks like
this:

int defs = (P[d]>>5) & 0x7;

This should be changed into:

int defs = (P[d]>>13) & 0x7;

If you just change this single line in the source code and recompile
the program, you will hopefully end up with a somewhat stronger
version of Phalanx.

--
Tord Romstad