Ferret ,
a chess engine by Bruce Moreland. Ferret won the Amateur World Microcomputer Chess Champion Title in Paderborn 1995 and was two times winner of the World Microcomputer Speed-Chess Champion, in Jakarta 1996 and Paris 1997.
Description of Ferret from Bruce Moreland's site [5] :
Ferret is a "normal" chess program. By that I mean that it uses alpha-beta full-width search, a quiescent search, a transposition hash table, an evaluation function that is called at the tips, and so forth. It uses null-move forward pruning, and for that I am indebted to Chrilly Donninger, who did not invent this technique, but he made it accessible to the amateur community via an ICCA Journal article (Vol. 16 #3, September 1993).
The program uses endgame databases of my own design and construction, but which aren't any better than the Nalimov, Edwards, or Thompson endgame databases. I wrote my own because I didn't want to take advantage of code written by others, since I felt that the program would be less mine if I did so. The program has a series of special case low-material evaluation functions that it uses when endgame databases are not present, and in some cases when they are. The program is written 100% in C, and is portable to any platform that runs any Windows-based operating system, including multiprocessor machines.
1995
Description given in 1995 from the ICCA-site [6] :
Ferret is a "normal" brute-force program that runs under Windows NT. Techniques and tools used by the program include alpha-beta pruning, selective search extensions, quiescence search limited by a static exchange evaluator, null-move forward pruning, a 50,000-positions opening book, several hash tables and a few simple endgame databases. The program consists of about 20,000 lines of C code and has been compiled using MicrosoftVisual C++ 2.0. Ferret searches approximately 18,000-32,000 nodes per second on a Pentium 66. It was written during off-hours over a period of about 4 years, for fun. Ferret finished fifth in Don Beal's uniform platform tournament last September. It has also played several hundred games of blitz chess on the Internet Chess Server, where it has been shown to be competitive among strong human players and various commercial programs. Ferret is copyrighted but its author is not particularly secretive about the program as he feels indebted to the many people who have answered his own questions.
Ferret is a normal chess program. It uses null-move forward pruning and other standard techniques. It is a leaf-node evaluator, and searches 80- 350K nps (120K typical middlegame) on a Pentium Pro 200 mhz machine.
Ferret was a derivative of Moreland’s open source engine GNU Chess.
is not correct, neither was GNU Chess a program by Bruce Moreland, nor was Ferret a derivative of GNU Chess [9]:
The program is 100% original, although at the time I started I had access to the Gnuchess source code. That code was kind of messy and it was its messy state that inspired me to think that I could do better.
a chess engine by Bruce Moreland. Ferret won the Amateur World Microcomputer Chess Champion Title in Paderborn 1995 and was two times winner of the World Microcomputer Speed-Chess Champion, in Jakarta 1996 and Paris 1997.
Ferret became second at the 14th World Microcomputer Chess Championship, Jakarta 1996 without losing a game. At the 9th World Computer Chess Championship, Paderborn 1999, Ferret was unlucky in not winning a dramatical playoff against Shredder.
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Quote by Bruce Moreland [4]:Descriptions
By Bruce Moreland
Description of Ferret from Bruce Moreland's site [5] :The program uses numerous common extensions such as check extension, recapture extension, and single-response to check. It also uses a sort of singular-extension that is loosely based upon the extension of this name that appears in Deep Thought and presumably Deep Blue. The evaluation function is designed to catch common features without being slow, but it's slow enough that the program isn't particularly fast.
The program uses endgame databases of my own design and construction, but which aren't any better than the Nalimov, Edwards, or Thompson endgame databases. I wrote my own because I didn't want to take advantage of code written by others, since I felt that the program would be less mine if I did so. The program has a series of special case low-material evaluation functions that it uses when endgame databases are not present, and in some cases when they are. The program is written 100% in C, and is portable to any platform that runs any Windows-based operating system, including multiprocessor machines.
1995
Description given in 1995 from the ICCA-site [6] :1997
Description given in 1997 from the ICCA-site:GNU Chess?
The quote of Monty Newborn in Beyond Deep Blue [7], pg. 29 [8]See also
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