Monarch News
Welcome to Monarch Chess' home page. Here you'll find all you need to know about Monarch Chess - my UCI chess engine.
It's been fun to develop and I hope you have fun using the engine. It's currently not too strong (~2100 ELO) but whenever I have a spare moment I'm trying to improve it. I'd also be interested in know what you think of the engine and in particular if you find any bugs or obvious weaknesses.
If you want to get started you can download the latest version, grab Arena, a free chess interface, and start playing.
Remember, it's only a game - have fun,
Latest News..
August 2nd, 2006
In preparation for the upcoming 2006 ACCA Persidents tournament, Monarch (version 1.7) now has a basic understanding of mobility. I've added mobility into the evaluation for bishops and rook. It seems to have had a positive impact on the playing strength so I've released Monarch 1.7. Unless some bugs are found this will be the version that takes part in the ACCA tournament.
June 23rd, 2006
I've added Futility Pruning and it seems to make a significant improvement to the search. I must say I was reluctant to add Futility Pruning since the saved moves are normally cheap nodes that would be pruned at the root of a quiescent search. Nevertheless from my tests it seems to improve the play by +40 ELO so I've released it as Monarch 1.6
June 1st, 2006
It's been a while since a new version of Monarch has been released. Version 1.5 is the result of a 80% re-write that has taken about eighteen months to complete - yes, I'm slow. The code base of version 1.0 was just too messy and as a result buggy. I'm aiming for a core of solid and bug free code that will allow me to try out a wide range of ideas. Version 1.5 is internally much simpler than version 1 as virtually all of the color dependent code has been removed. I've also worked hard to make the engine as stable as possible. I think it's now as stable as the best. You can see a more extensive list of internal features on the technical page. Initial independent tests show that Monarch 1.5 has improved by +60 ELO since version 1.0 - it's a great start and hopefully there's more improvements to come.