16-05-2006

A faster x64 compile is available.

• The previous compile was a debug compile
• No version number change !

06-05-2006

Snitch 1.6.2 available.

• Winboard protocol fixes only
• No eval or search changes

06-05-2006

Snitch 1.6.1 available.

• Asymmetry bug in rook evaluation fixed
• Asymmetry bug in king safty evaluation fixed
• WB protocol bug fixed. (This one haunted snitch for quite a while, made it freeze at the end of a game)
• Outpost evaluation added
• Knight evaluation tuned
• Bishop evaluation tuned
• Space evaluation added

10-03-2006

Snitch 1.4.5 available.

• MultiPV mode added
• Several minor search and eval tunings
• General code cleanup

12-01-2006

Snitch 1.2.4 available.

• Bugfix: Bug in time control introduced in 1.2.x (forfeit on time) removed

06-01-2006

Snitch 1.2.2

• Some minor bugfixes
• Minor eval changes
• General speedup

17-11-2004

Snitch 1.0.8

• Removed bug that made Snitch hang sometimes after end of game
• Better moveorder
• Qsearch pruning changed

10-07-2004

Snitch 1.0.4.

• Removed super-verbose UCI info that slowed Snitch down under some UCI-GUIs

09-28-2004

Snitch 1.0.0

• Completely new engine
• slower but stronger than Hagrid
• See here for a detailed comparison

07-23-2002

Hagrid 0.7.56 available.

• Minor bugfixes
• Evaluation tuning

06-22-2002

Hagrid 0.7.47

• UCI Bugfix: Hagrid pondered with the latest Fritz interface only. Now UCI-pondering should work with other UCI-GUIs as well.

06-16-2002

Hagrid 0.7.45

• Added Winboard pondering
• Evaluation Tuning
• Several minor bugs removed

04-13-2002

Hagrid 0.7.2

• Tablebase support for Nalimov tablebases (compressed or uncompressed).
• Fixed bug in pawn-hashing.
• Some evaluation tuning.
• Should play much stronger than previous version.
  

04-01-2002

Hagrid 0.6.34

• Fixed bug that crashed hagrid when using incremental time under Winboard.
• Added / bugfixed some winboard features:
  Move now
  Analyze
  Claims draw on 3 fold repetition / 50 move rule
  Resigns

03-31-2002

Big opening book now available in download area.

03-30-2002

Hagrid 0.6.32

• Fixed bug in hashtable update.
• Replaced buggy book file with working one.

03-24-2002

This site was born to make Hagrid available to public.

March 2002

I started implementing the UCI protocol to make Hagrid run under Fritz GUI. Now, end of march, Hagrid should play somewhere between 2100 and 2200 ELO.

Jan. 2002

First two month of 2002 were mostly dedicated to implementing several Winboard features. The only real improvement was the use of null-moves which gained several ELOs.
After several month of developing a nameless engine I decided it needs an name now, and here we are: Hagrid was born.

October 2001

The first running version was full of bugs making it play really bad (around 1800ELO) or even crash. It took me several weeks to find the really big ones and I’m not sure if I will ever find all of them. End of 2001 I had a Winboard engine playing reasonable chess at about 2000 ELO.

September 2001

September 2001 I took first interest in computer chess. After some disappointing experiments with my own thoughts about how to write a chess program (I thought of saving the complete game tree in memory) I began to collect information around the web on how to do it better. Some days later - knowing much more on how to do it the right way - I started writing my own chess engine.