= Magnum Chess -- Goals of Project =

I have worked on Magnum Chess as a hobby for several years.  It originally was a school project.  
Magnum Chess has several advanced features such as magic hashed bitboard move generation.  
However, it's playing strength is fairly weak.  

Magnum Chess supports the UCI protocol.  I am able to play Magnum Chess against other chess engines using 
the Area GUI.  


==Goal 1==
I would like to improve the strength of Magnum Chess.  I feel that there are several possible errors in the 
code which may be hurting playing strength.  I recently added Perft and Divide commands.  Using these, I was 
able to track down many bugs in the move generation.   I recently re-wrote my evaluation function.  The code 
is much clearner now and I added several evaluation terms.  However, I have not noticed any increase in playing 
strength.  Perhaps this is a good area to look for coding errors.

==Goal 2==
I need to get Magnum Chess entered in some computer chess tournaments.  To do this, I will need to make sure my 
UCI protocol handling is correct and includes all the necessary UCI commands.  For example, currently my program
does not return the principal variation when it completes a search.  There are several other UCI commands which my 
program does not recognize such as ponder.  Several tournaments which I would be interested in entering are as 
follows:

 * CCT http://cctchess.com/
 * WOCT http://vigo.altervista.org/
 * RWBC http://www.rwbc-chess.de/
 * ChessWar http://www.open-aurec.com/chesswar/
 * CEGT http://www.husvankempen.de/nunn/

==Goal 3==
I would like to use the engine to explore other computer chess algorithms. For example, I plan to switch from the 
alpha-beta search algorithm to MTD(f).  I also would be interested in adding a parallel search algorithm to take 
advantage of multi-core processors.