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Back to BikJump

November last year, I posted a blog entry on my progress with "Deep" BikJump, i.e. adding multi-threading to my engine to speedup the search. Due to many distractions, I have not worked on that feature since that posting.... The chess engine bug is starting to itch again, however, so I decided to pick this up. Hopefully I can release a SMP version of BikJump soon!

WBEC-Ridderkerk Ratings

Leo Dijksman kindly posted a chess engine rating list on the WBEC-Ridderkerk forum , based on edition 11 to 16 of the WBEC-Ridderkerk computer chess competition. Below I show some stats for various versions of BikJump. Rank Version Elo + - games score oppo. draws 517 BikJump 2.01-x64 2111 105 105 30 50% 2109 27% 609 BikJump 1.8-x64 1995 132 125 30 70% 1798 20% 662 BikJump 1.1 1911 141 160 26 23% 2199 8% 693 BikJump 1.5 1851 131 131 25 50% 1823 12% Many thanks to Leo for providing the ongoing WBEC tournaments!

Cacti

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With an eye on California's water shortage, we decided to do some water-efficient landscaping. With enormous help of my sister, we converted a corner of our front lawn into a mini cacti corner. In another corner, far away from playing children, we decided to put some larger, more thorny cacti. Hopefully this way we can keep the garden green with less water!

A Fallen Tree

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This weekend a large branch of my neighbor's tree broke and fell into our garden, right on top of our swing and patio furniture. Luckily nobody was hurt, since we all just came back from church when it happened. The swing broke most of the fall and even the solar panels survived! Needless to say I spend the rest of the day cutting wood, very kindly assisted by neighbors from all sides!

Thanks Android Game Users!

The last few weeks, I received many very kind emails as well as positive comments at the Android Market about my games. This has been a very nice contrast with the sometimes rough comments or emails I also get (constructive feedback is always welcome, but please study the rules of the game before you complain :-)). So I just wanted to say thank you to all that took the time to write a nice email or comment!