Sirius 0.8.0

Sirius is a program for playing the game of othello. The program includes an AI (Artificial Intelligence) opponent which plays at a very challenging level and is actually quite hard to beat. The AI opponents strength can therefore be adjusted in several ways to give you a suitable opponent.
The AI opponent uses a plain alpha-beta search with hashing to figure out which move to make. To be able to tell a god position from a bad one, it uses a pattern based evaluation function.
The pattern used is the 9 discs surrounding each corner and the 8 discs creating the edge of the board. The evaluation function also takes mobility, potential mobility and parity into count. For the initial 9 moves the AI opponent optionally uses a simple opening book.
During midgame it searches and evaluates about 200.000 nodes per second on a PIII 750 MHz, in the endgame this number is significantly higher due to more transpositions and a less expensive evaluation function.
Enhancements:
- Russian translation. (Alexandre Prokoudine)
- Fixed problem with non-latin UTF-8 characters. (Vyacheslav Sdiconov)
- Trippled the size of the opening book.
- Made the hints unsensitive at startup.
- Man page for Debian.