2026 I would like you to teach me joy, and I will go to the library to learn, I would like to see wisdom everywhere and I shall turn away no thought and I would like to feel hope again because it is currently lost.

Watching old episodes of Stargate SG1 and they used to make 23 episodes of this a year? Outdoor shoots, CGI, epic stories. Why can’t we do this anymore? (I’m sure we do, just not with science fiction).

Looking through my 2025 decks I made for my teaching. I made some awesome awesome slides. In total about 100 new decks. Also, this slide is true.

My 2025 retrospective of stuff I did and didn't do (LinkedIn link) www.linkedin.com/pulse/graeme...

I’d like journalists interviewing CEOs of companies investing in AI always ask this question so they can explain why they’re more valuable than the people doing the actual work.

Okay, I think I'm about 2500 ELO now with the new engine. It's much better DESPITE my awful C++ code and I think all I've got left to do this year is to tidy that up so it's not shameful. I am proud of my NNUE implementation, occasionally this old programmer has a few tricks from the old days...

One of the very easy missteps you can make in programming a chess engine is to assume that every improvement you make actually improves your engine. Today I added a new way of running moves, only generating moves as they were needed. Yesterday's old AI? Beats this new one 2 to 1...

I loved the tile editor Virgin/Westwood used for their 2D games like this. I've forgotten Ed's last name from the Irvine office who wrote a lot of it, and I'm sure Westwood probably made their own, but I have fond memories of the magic that it seemed to easily make. It was one of the first "tools".

Well since we're all back here... this still sums me up well, and Bella is smiling in that photo which is always good. Here's a slide of the few of the games I made over the centuries. You may have played some of them when you were young!

I haven't taken that many photographs this year, probably 100 or so. I used to take a few a day of the dogs and spiderwebs and life and so forth, but since the world has gone all *waves hands around* I stopped. In 2026 I'm going to start taking photos again. Here's the rainbow Bella and I saw today.

Okay, beating Stockfish at level 10 now by a factor of 2:1. That's an ELO of over 2400 I think (so Stockfish has one eye shut and one hand behind its back because it is... much better than that unleashed).

Tired doggies.

Well this is encouraging, winning against Stockfish! To be fair I need to redo this, my AI is finding the opening book and Stockfish isn't so it becomes time constrained very quickly.

Results of overnight chess run, won 78 games, lost 18. But 8 of the losses were due to an illegal move! In my engine! I tracked down the bug to code I wrote two years ago that left a flag for pawn promotion in place. Very exciting! Also, bad.. bad bug.

Another 500 games overnight, today's AI vs. yesterday's. Big change today to time management (black in this picture) and move pruning. So far new AI is up 4 to zilch. My takeaway from the graph is that my new AIs eval is much calmer, it's not the roller coaster the old one was. This is good.

Narrator voice “In fact, the world had not run out of ideas, it was just that the lizard people running the world didn’t like the ideas we had”

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!

The problem with writing a chess AI on Christmas Eve is proximity to whisky. Testing takes a long time, you've got to run a lot of games with each change, which is normally a coffee sport for me. Except tonight not so much so ... we are done coding.

This is what makes chess AI exciting to me. My new AI here is playing white, and it was losing the game until about turn 25 when black made a huge blunder, giving my AI the opening it needed. The graph here shows who the evaluator thinks is winning, above the line is white, below is black.

I think my biggest engine change this year was to stop using the C++ standard library.. that gave me about a 50% boost in nodes/sec. No more allocations. At all. Next up is PVS (Principal Variation Search) which should help pruning quite a bit.

So there’s an episode next week right? #pluribus

Going to have to up the level of Stockfish a bit.. encouraging! I found I can set the level via UCI.

First you fix the move generator, then the threading, then the move pruning, then the move generator again, then the move ordering, then finally.. well darn it, now I need to fix the time controls. I was really smart last year, it's taking a bit to beat my old AI..

My Chess AI went 49 moves against Stockfish in my test tonight, which is encouraging enough to leave it trying again and again overnight. Stockfish generally has me on the rails by move 20, and always beats me by move 30 so the fact an AI I wrote goes that far, it boggles my mind I can write that.

Not sure if I'm doing this chess game right or not...

Two awesome people chatting game dev!

I'm not the father of indie games either, but there was a bunch of us in the late 70s and early 80s making "indie" games on cassette tapes selling them at markets and swap meets.

Been spiraling down a bit. Tinnitus has been really bad because of stress from *waves hands around*, which means I am not sleeping, which is making me more stressed which is making my tinnitus worse.

Y'all, I don't appreciate you nominating my contemporaries as the "father" of Indie games, since it makes me feel old. Also my generation had many of GameDevs inspire us (i.e. Shareware GameDevs). I will however accept "Jeff Minter" as the "Uncle" of Indie Games. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Mi...

True fact.

You know what? I'm going to designate today, in my power as, well, having no power, as "Take A Picture of your Dog or Cat" day.

I used to play Final Fantasy XIV every day for years. I was a high level black mage, knew all the rotations, had massive DPS. I just reinstalled it and loaded that character and... I'm going to have to start at level 1. I remember... nothing.

Look what showed up today!

In 2003 we got Nick and Nora, our two barn cats that had never seen a tree they didn't like to climb. Even it was an indoor fake Christmas tree (Nora you can see clearly, Nick is on top of the alien next to the tree in the fuzzier picture, I suspect I took these on my Palmpilot Phone).

Ha. Truth.

Okay I’m going to say something I never thought I would say. I thought Jarod Leto was good in Tron:Ares. However that movie is not set in a believable Tronverse, at least for me, the world building of the two previous movies was absent.

I mean technically LeStrad could make a comeback and win, but it seems statistically unlikely. He's already got 10x the thinking time of Adler.

"So you just kick these and it's okay?" "Yup! And sometimes the humans put them into piles for us to pounce on!"

Well fuck. Caught up on news. Going outside to look at the sky for a while.

Test 1 of playing with my new NNUE (efficiently updated neural network) and... speed is okay. This is a whole game.

Bella likes the corner of the bed to sleep. I like the corner of the bed to put my feet. She also likes to get me up no later than 7am so she can sleep into 8:30am in my spot. She gets the corner and I get up at 7am.

Chess update. I'm now at this for a depth 7 search: Depth 7: 3195901860 nodes (13976ms, 228670711 nps) For comparison on the same machine (Mac M2 Ultra) stockfish gets this: Total time (ms) : 10731 Nodes searched : 3195901860 Nodes/second : 297819575 I'm getting within striking distance!

This is a very good start. The two things to note here are at depth 7 from opening there are 3195901860 possible moves if you look ahead 7 moves (this is the correct number) and that I'm getting 96m nps doing a perft run (only working out moves).

It's time for my annual rewrite of my chess engine. Last year we beat stockfish ONCE in thousands of games. This year coming at it with an all new move generation idea.

So if you're walking your dog and trying to take a photo with the same hand you are holding the leash with (so Bella can make sure I follow her) you get really cool light bending the world.

I actually think this is very true.

So we're actually in the mirror universe aren't we? Those episodes of Enterprise were actually from our universe and the others from some strange place. It will take a particular geek to get that reference..

Well this is cool. Going to check this out over the holidays. github.com/lepned/Engin...

Last day of teaching for the year today. I am assigning myself two coma days tomorrow and Friday. Bella has already organized nap times and some gentle walks.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksV... Thank the maker- I was feeling clumsy for about three releases. Well done Apple.