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		GromitChess, an UCI compatible chess engine by Frank Schneider and Kai Skibbe. Gromit, later renamed to GromitChess, was initially written by Frank. In 1999 former tester Kai Skibbe joined the development. Gromit and GromitChess played several IPCCCs, the WMCCC 1995, WCCC 1999 in Paderborn and the WMCCC 2001 in Maastricht, where it won the title of the Amateur World Microcomputer Chess Champion. It was available as Young Talent by ChessBase running under the Fritz6 GUI [1]. GromitChess is the predecessor of the chess engine Anaconda [2].
Wallace & Gromit [3]

Description

given in 1999 from the ICGA tournament site ^[4]:

GromitChess is a C++-program, developed in a Linux-environment (Emacs, gcc). It searches about 25000 to 50000 nodes per second on a K6/200 and tries to be intelligent rather than fast. Attacktables are the primary datastructure (16 bit for every square and player; bit n is set if piece n attacks the square). The search uses iterative deepening, PVS, transposition tables, killer- and history heuristic, nullmove (R=2), about 10 chess-specific extensions and some pruning heuristics. The quiescence uses a static exchange evaluator and includes some checks and other threatening moves. Parts of the evaluation are initialized at the root but most of the work is done at the leafnodes. You can find more information and executables in the WWW.

Copy Make

Frank Schneider on Gromit's Copy-Make approach ^[5]:

I think it depends on your program and the board representation . Gromit uses copy+update and >1KB is copied every move (which is maybe too much). When I decided to do it that way (on an Amiga) I only considered clock cycles, but on a PC the low memory-bandwidth is the real problem. Since Gromit's evaluation and search heuristics use most of the processor time I never tried update+take back, because I guess it would give me less than 10% speedup, probably being slower than copy+update. There are some advantages of copy+update: - it is easy to program - it is easier to do some 'clever' things that would be difficult to take back - you can compare the current position with previous positions in the search tree An alternative would use a mix of copied and static data structures.

See also

• Anaconda
• Comics
• PocketGrandmaster

Forum Posts

• Re: Unmake move v copy the board by Frank Schneider, CCC, January 24, 1999
• Gromitchess bookcheating (for Vincent DIEPEVEEN) by Gian-Carlo Pascutto, CCC, August 23, 2001
• Goliath Light, Gromit, Patzer, SOS, etc. commercially sold by Theo van der Storm, CCC, August 28, 2001
• The Crazy Bishop 0046 and Gromit 3.8.2 by Federico Corigliano, CCC, August 31, 2001 » The Crazy Bishop

External Links

• GromitChess' ICGA Tournaments
• New features in GromitChess 1.2
• Anaconda Chess Home Page
• Wallace & Gromit - The Official Site
• Wallace & Gromit from Wikipedia

References

1. ^ Support - ChessBase, May 28th, 2000
2. ^ Anaconda Chess Home Page
3. ^ Wallace & Gromit - The Official Site
4. ^ GromitChess' ICGA Tournaments
5. ^ Re: Unmake move v copy the board by Frank Schneider, CCC, January 24, 1999

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