My French is not really good, but if I understand the discussion
between David and Stéphane correctly David argues that Tax Abalone must
be slow. Stéphane argues that this is not the case, due to the limited
branching that Stéphane added to the alpha-beta algorithm: For non-leaf
nodes he does a 1 or 2 ply search (depending on distance to leaves),
and keeps only the 6 best moves for the full depth search.

I am not yet done with merging the source code, but a quick comparison
of version Tax abalone 1.5.3 (which is the code base I have) and the
current version of Nacre, shows that Tax abalone is pretty fast: 6 ply
in 1 sec, whereas Nacre does only 3-4 ply in 1 sec. I played only one
blitz game of 1 sec/move, and Nacre won this 6-0 despite the large
difference in search depth. Thus, speed is not always enough.

When I have merged version 2.0 with my version 1.5.3, I will return
with more test results.

Peer