New version of Chinese Chess engine released

There have been many changes to the engine since the last release. Much of these changes considerably slowed its search system, but to compensate it has gotten much stronger in my opinion. It uses more sound opening strategey even while lacking an opening book.

Quiescence searching is an available option in this version, but I have turned it off by default for now. Using quiescence adds an enormous amount of time to its analysis, I couldn't bear it. To turn quiescence on use the command "quiescence on" while running the program (now command line option yet.).

End game has not been thuroghly tested, but it has been beaten with a few positions to see what would happen. I have worked many kinks out but there are still some positions where it will not find a mate even with quiescence turned on. For instance, the following position baffles it:
c2a5/4ak3/6RH1/4p4/9/9/9/9/2rr1p3/1c2K1C2 r

I can still beat this engine, though it is getting more challenging, so strong players will still not find it adiquate yet. I hope that will change when the transposition table arrives and search depth increases enough to make it a strong player. Pondering will also increase its strength and that step is just waiting for the TTable.

I am going to be spending the next few days cleaning parts of the engine up and trying to increase the speed of many of the algorithms. If I succeed there will be another release within a few days, if not then the next release will be when the transposition table is complete.

BTW, I have merged the branches on this site. TSITO is still written in C++ and is a totally different beast from xiangqi-engine, but I believe the separation was confusing some people as the old version was still getting downloaded more often than the current development tree. I will be making all tsito releases available under the xiangqi-engine package now.

NR