Steve Maughan

Deep Blue was IBM’s pet project from the late 90’s and has never been available for public scrutiny. It’s estimated strength is about 2800 ELO. To put this in context, if the latest Stockfish, running on a iPhone, played 100 games against Deep Blue it would win at least 95.

I'm reasonably well know in the field of computer chess and competed in the 2015 World Computer Chess Championships. Although Delphi is my first language, my engine was written in plain old "C". However, there are a number of strong open source chess programs written in Delphi. Here are a few: Booot: booot6_4_release.rar (dropbox.com) Open-Critter: GitHub - rchastain/open-critter: UCI chess engine written in Pascal by Richard Vida Durandal: GitHub - rchastain/durandal: UCI chess engine written in Pascal Steve

One aspect I appreciate is some attention to the compiler's output. It seems 10.5 will finally get some floating point optimization!! Steve

Brilliant! Thanks for this.

It's a roadmap not a punch-list!

Maybe something special is brewing! If I had to guess maybe it would be RAD WebAssembly

I disabled MadExcept IDE exception catching and that didn't fix the problem. It was a good idea. Thanks — Steve

If I run my application in debug mode and then exit the application, I get a small dialog informing me "Debug process not initialized" — see screenshot. I then have two buttons: "OK" and "Details". When I click "Details" I can see the MadExcept error report. I can't see anything obviously wrong. Does anyone know how to fix this? All help appreciated! I'm using Delphi DX 10.4.1 Steve bugreport.txt

I won't change my library but I'd still like to be aware of any newer, and maybe better, libraries. Having had a quick look it seems to be third party. I had thought it was shipped with Delphi since it was System.Zip2. I try to minimize the use of third party components so definitely won't switch, or even look any further.

That was a question I had — why wasn't there a checksum error when it tried to decompress?

Thanks David — all good advice. I was really looking to see if there were a list of known bugs with the ZCompressStream. It seems file corruption post saving is probably the most likely explanation.

Thanks — I wasn't aware of System.ZIP2. I'll take a look - Steve

My application saves data as a compressed JSON file. I use the standard System.ZLib routines ZCompressStream and ZDecompressStream to handle the compression. I thought these were just a wrapper around standard ZLib routines. Earlier today someone sent me an application file that couldn't be opened. It turns out it couldn't be decompressed. It could have been corrupted after being saved. The decompression routine went into some sort of endless loop when it attempts to open the file. My question is: does anyone know of any problems compressing data using ZCompressStream? I'm using Delphi DX 10.4.1. Are there any other third party ZLib compatible compression and decompression routines? Steve

Thanks but this seems to be C++ only.

Thanks! I thought we were due for an update soon