Sinobyl

toc
 * Home * Engines * Sinobyl**

initially called **Latista** and in 2008 renamed to Sinobyl due to trademark issues, is a WinBoard compliant chess engine by Eric Oldre, written in C++, and first released in 2004. Sinobyl, aka Latista 1.4, was one of the first engines besides Scorpio and Gambit Fruit, to use Daniel Shawul's Scorpio Bitbases. Sinobyl was later ported to C#, released in 2014 as NoraGrace, dedicated to //Nora Grace Oldre// who was taken from Eric and his wife unexpectedly a few days before she was due to be born.
 * Sinobyl**,

=Description= //based on Latista 1.5//

Board Representation
Sinobyl represents the board with bitboards and uses rotated bitboards to determine sliding piece attacks.

Search
The engine applies alpha-beta with transposition table and quiescence search inside an iterative deepening framework with aspiration windows, enhanced by null move pruning (R=3, verification search in endgame), fractional extensions for checks and pawn to 7th rank moves, futility pruning, and various reductions. Move ordering considers hash move, IID, killer moves, and static exchange evaluation. To avoid standing pat in quiescence where pieces of the side to move were just attacked and en prise, Eric introduced //horizon threat extensions// in Latista 1.4.

Evaluation
Features: > Pawn Shelter
 * Material
 * Pawn Hash Table
 * Piece-Square Tables
 * King Safety
 * Pawn Races
 * Development
 * Piece Activity

=Forum Posts=
 * [|Bitboard board representation] by Eric Oldre, CCC, January 13, 2005
 * [|An interesting bug i found tonight in latista] by Eric Oldre, CCC, January 16, 2005
 * [|Idea i'm been using to help tune latista] by Eric Oldre, CCC, January 24, 2005
 * [|Latista 1.3 released] by Eric Oldre, CCC, July 02, 2005
 * [|Latista 1.4 released. (Rybka killer edition!)] by Eric Oldre, CCC, December 23, 2005
 * [|Latista 1.5] by Eric Oldre, CCC, January 13, 2006
 * [|Re: new/updated engines: 2008/11/28-29] by Eric Oldre, Winboard Forum, December 01, 2008
 * [|New open source engine in C# - NoraGrace] by Eric Oldre, CCC, June 20, 2014

=External Links=

Chess Engine

 * [|Latista] from WBEC Ridderkerk
 * [|Index of /chess/engines/Norbert's Collection/Sinobyl 1.5 release 29.11.2008] by Norbert Raimund Leisner, hosted by Kirill Kryukov
 * [|trunk/Sinobyl | SVN | Assembla]
 * [|Latista (Sinobyl) 1.5] in CCRL 40/4
 * [|Latista (Sinobyl) 1.5] in KCEC

Misc
> [|latistaa - Wiktionary]
 * [|latista - Wiktionary]
 * [|Sino- - Wiktionary]
 * [|Wordlist sinobyl... | Welsh Prose 1300-1425]
 * [|Chernobyl - Name origin | byllia (билля, grass blades or stalks)]

=References= =What links here?= include page="Sinobyl" component="backlinks" limit="20"
 * Up one Level**