My engine also has serious problems with too many draws.

I'm researching at the end of evaluation, when we send the Score to the search, very simply like this:

if (Position->white_to_move && Value == 0) // 7 may be an option UCI
{
Value += 7;// if Score PV is +0.04, now is +0.11
}
if ...

I've made a mistake during the compile of the version 1.2a
There is the update 1.2b available https://sites.google.com/site/mdannib/download

Regards

/Matteo

We discover a strange bug that occur occasionally in positions with blocked pawn structure.
The fix is available https://sites.google.com/site/mdannib/download

For those who downloaded the version 1.2 please upgrade to 1.2a

Regards

/Matteo

For those interested we have just released the new version of our chess engine BlackMamba.
There are a lot of news "under the hood"

https://sites.google.com/site/mdannib/home

Regards
Matteo & Maurizio.

The actual beta of my BlackMamba discover the dead draw easily....
It is a single core engine running on my netbook :D

The big difference the helps the Mamba to find this draw is the "Pawn Blockage detection" the same principle implemented inside Chiron by Ubaldo Farina.
http://www.talkchess.com ...

compared to program Similarity_3,

60% with Ivanhoe and Fire


http://i35.fastpic.ru/big/2012/0411/12/e4d9be84c625ac06dc26102537527012.png

Velmarim, i m just saying that the fen used for the optimization fase during the compile is not a "concrete evidence".
This is the piece of code that retrieve ...

Good find -- I thought those FEN strings would turn something up -- I checked against the benchmark positions in Critter and Stockfish before I stopped looking. No surprise. Nice that he made an OSX version.

jb

The strings are used with the command "benchmark x" (x is the selectep depth) from ...