Greg Strong wrote on Sat, Dec 9, 2017 11:58 PM UTC:
Retrofitting an existing high-quality engine to play variants is problematic. It is not so bad for variants that are very close, like Fischer Random. Even things like Siriwan that are played on 8 x 8 might not be tooo bad. But adding the ability to change board size to a program which was created without that in mind would be very difficult. And it probably would not be worth the time. The really top-level engines like Stockfish are so good because they have lots and lots of code that very specifically designed and optimized to play Chess. Most of this code is, at best, throw-away for playing variants, and at worst, downright harmful and hard to remove.
Best to create from scratch. Want to dip your toes into these waters, I would recommend you download the source code for SjaakII, and see if you can improve it, or at least understand it.
Retrofitting an existing high-quality engine to play variants is problematic. It is not so bad for variants that are very close, like Fischer Random. Even things like Siriwan that are played on 8 x 8 might not be tooo bad. But adding the ability to change board size to a program which was created without that in mind would be very difficult. And it probably would not be worth the time. The really top-level engines like Stockfish are so good because they have lots and lots of code that very specifically designed and optimized to play Chess. Most of this code is, at best, throw-away for playing variants, and at worst, downright harmful and hard to remove.
Best to create from scratch. Want to dip your toes into these waters, I would recommend you download the source code for SjaakII, and see if you can improve it, or at least understand it.
Cheers :)