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Abyss

GerdIsenberg — Sat, 05 Aug 2017 19:27:34 GMT

Home * Engines * Abyss
Home * Games * Chinese Chess Engines * Abyss

		Abyss, a Chinese Chess program by Chun Ye and Tony Marsland, written in C under Unix aka SunOS. A X Window GUI was written in C++ by Haiying Wang ^[1]. The program was subject of Chun Ye's 1992 master thesis at University of Alberta ^[2] on the topic of selectivity and extension heuristics in the domain of Chinese Chess. Not only Ye's advisor, Tony Marsland, contributed to the development of the program, but also Don Beal - at that time visiting professor at University of Alberta - in particular concerning null move quiescence search. Abyss participated at all three Computer Olympiads which took place in Maastricht, winning the gold medal (shared) at the 3rd Computer Olympiad, 1991, while the 1999 version played in 2001 and 2002, respectively.
At the Edge of the Abyss ^[3]

Abyss' ICGA Tournaments

Description

The framework of Abyss ^[4] was based on the Western experimental Chess program Parabelle by Fred Popowich and Tony Marsland ^[5].

Move Generation

Abyss' board is represented as Mailbox - a one-dimensional array of 90 computer words, indexed by 0 .. 89. Pieces are encoded by ±1 for red and black pawns until ±7 for red and black kings, empty squares are represented by zero. To detect the edges of the board and palace during move generation, board arrays of pre-computed 12-bit direction masks consisting of four groups for each orthogonal direction of 3 bits each are utilized. Only the empty intersection of the move direction with the mask of the target square indicates target on board or inside palace, followed by piece specific tests to generate pseudo legal moves or to continue a direction loop for rook or cannon. Detection of strictly legal moves, i.e. it does not expose the own king in check, or does not oppose both kings on the same file with no pieces intervening, is delayed until the move is actually made for efficiency reasons - since not all generated pseudo legal moves are examined.

Search

The search procedure of Abyss was subject of Chun Ye's thesis concerning selectivity, in particular extensions which are combined in various experiments, and further elaborated in two additional papers along with Tony Marsland ^[6] ^[7]. Abyss already featured recursive null move pruning with depth reduction of 1 ^[8], and further Don Beal's null move quiescence search ^[9]. A piece evading move extension was motivated by threat detection concerning the complicated repetition rules of Chinese Chess.

Basics

Move Ordering

Selectivity

Evaluation

Material Balance with Point Values

Piece	Opening	Endgame
King	7000
Rook	1800
Cannon	900	800
Horse	800	900
Elephant	300
Advisor	300
Pawn	100

Piece-Square Tables
Square Control
King Safety
Attacking King Zone
Penalty for King on rank or file of opponent's Cannon

Misc

Opening Book

Abyss' ICGA Tournaments

^[10]

Edition	Version	Ranking	Participants
3rd Computer Olympiad, Maastricht 1991		1	2
6th Computer Olympiad, Maastricht 2001	Abyss '99	3	3
7th Computer Olympiad, Maastricht 2002	Abyss '99	4	4

Publications

Chun Ye (1992). Experiments in Selective Search Extensions. M.Sc. thesis, Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, pdf
Chun Ye, Tony Marsland (1992). Experiments in Forward Pruning with Limited Extensions. ICCA Journal, Vol. 15, No. 2, pdf
Chun Ye, Tony Marsland (1992). Selective Extensions in Game-Tree Search. Heuristic Programming in AI 3, pdf

External Links

Engine

Abyss' ICGA Tournaments

Misc

References

^ Haiying Wang (1994). An application-oriented user interface model and development system. Ph.D. thesis, University of Alberta, pdf, see 6.2 Chinese Chess Program pp. 101.
^ Chun Ye (1992). Experiments in Selective Search Extensions. M.Sc. thesis, Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, pdf
^ Lysefjord, Norway- a man standing on Preikestolen at the edge of the Abyss, Image by Mercy, August 2008, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
^ Description is based on Chun Ye (1992). Experiments in Selective Search Extensions. M.Sc. thesis, Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, pdf
^ Fred Popowich, Tony Marsland. (1983) Parabelle: Experience with a Parallel Chess Program. Technical Report 83-7. Computing Science Department, University of Alberta, pdf
^ Chun Ye, Tony Marsland (1992). Experiments in Forward Pruning with Limited Extensions. ICCA Journal, Vol. 15, No. 2, pdf
^ Chun Ye, Tony Marsland (1992). Selective Extensions in Game-Tree Search. Heuristic Programming in AI 3, pdf
^ Gordon Goetsch, Murray Campbell (1990). Experiments with the Null-Move Heuristic. Computers, Chess, and Cognition, pp. 159-168
^ Don Beal (1989). Experiments with the Null Move. Advances in Computer Chess 5, A revised version is published (1990) under the title A Generalized Quiescence Search Algorithm. Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 85-98. ISSN 0004-3702.
^ Abyss' ICGA Tournaments

What links here?

Page	Date Edited
3rd Computer Olympiad	Jul 25, 2017
6th Computer Olympiad	Jul 22, 2017
7th Computer Olympiad	Jul 23, 2017
Abyss	Aug 5, 2017
Chun Ye	Jul 25, 2017
Engines	Mar 10, 2018
GUI	Mar 16, 2018
Haiying Wang	Jul 27, 2017
Null Move Pruning	Dec 2, 2017
Parabelle	Jul 28, 2017
Tony Marsland	Nov 27, 2017
University of Alberta	Feb 20, 2018

Up one Level

Anaconda

GerdIsenberg — Sat, 04 Jul 2015 13:29:55 GMT

Home * Engines * Anaconda

		Anaconda, a Chessbase compliant chess engine by Frank Schneider and Kai Skibbe and a successor of their GromitChess program, written in C++ with a 0x88 board representation, an improved evaluation and time-management, and some new search heuristics, which allow it to search deeper but more selective. GromitChess was renamed to Anaconda in 2003 to prevent copyright infringements with Wallace and Gromit by Aardman Animations ^[1] . The new name also devotes the positional playing style of the program, to slowly restrict its opponent mobility. Anaconda played the IPCCC 2003, IPCCC 2004, and IPCCC 2005, and as Chess960 compliant engine, the second Livingston Chess960 Computer World Championship.
John Collier - Lilith ^[2]

Forum Posts

Anaconda 1.0 (ex-GromitChess) available as CB-native by Kai Skibbe, CCC, March 08, 2003
the reason why Anaconda can´t draw against Hydra... by Thomas Lagershausen, CCC, March 01, 2005 » Hydra
Anaconda Strategy by BWater, Chess.com, September 22, 2009

External Links

Chess Engine

Misc

References

^ Anaconda 1.0 (ex-GromitChess) available as CB-native by Kai Skibbe, CCC, March 08, 2003
^ Lilith by John Collier, 1892, Oil on canvas, The Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport, England, Wikimedia Commons, Lilith from Wikipedia

What links here?

Page	Date Edited
Anaconda	Jul 4, 2015
Chess960CWC 2006	Sep 25, 2014
Eigenmann Endgame Test	Jun 1, 2017
Engines	Mar 10, 2018
Frank Schneider	Jan 7, 2016
Ginkgo	Jul 13, 2016
Gromit	Apr 5, 2017
IPCCC 2003	Aug 17, 2016
IPCCC 2004	Dec 1, 2014
IPCCC 2005	Aug 21, 2015
Kai Skibbe	Jan 7, 2016
PocketGrandmaster	Sep 17, 2015

Up one level

Arion

GerdIsenberg — Fri, 28 Nov 2014 16:22:44 GMT

Home * Engines * Arion

		Arion, an UCI compliant chess engine by Gabriel Guillory, written in C++, first released in December 2004. Arion had its over the board debut at the Seventh French Programmers Tournament, Massy 2005, and otherwise participates at Le Fou numérique and other rating lists.
Arion on a Dolphin ^[1]

Features

^[2]

Bitboards
Legal Move Generation
Iterative Deepening
NegaScout
Aspiration Windows
Transposition Table
Null Move Pruning
Futility Pruning
MVV/LVA
Razoring
Internal Iterative Deepening
History Heuristic
Killer Heuristic
Extensions (Standard & Non-standard)
Static Exchange Evaluation (Simple + Full)
Enhanced Transposition Cutoff
History Pruning
Lazy Evaluation
Adaptive Contempt Factor
Pondering
PGN analyzer
Perft

Forum Posts

questions about the new Arion engine by Dave, Winboard Forum, December 14, 2004
Arion 1.3 : 2359 by Patrick Buchmann, Winboard Forum, March 11, 2005
Arion 1.6 by Gabriel Guillory, Winboard Forum, September 09, 2005
Arion 1.7 + PgnScanner 0.32 by Gabriel Guillory, Winboard Forum, March 07, 2006
New link for Arion and PgnScanner by Gabriel Guillory, Winboard Forum, July 26, 2006

External Links

Chess Engine

Misc

References

^ Arion on a Dolphin, watercolor painting by Matthäus Kern, Illustration for Joseph Christian Freiherr von Zedlitz (1841). Der arme Sänger. (German)
^ based on Arion chess program, slightly edited

What links here?

Page	Date Edited
Arion	Nov 28, 2014
Dolphin	Nov 28, 2014
Engines	Mar 10, 2018
Gabriel Guillory	Sep 9, 2016
Massy 2005	Jan 29, 2013

Up one level

Asterisk

GerdIsenberg — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 20:07:32 GMT

Home * Engines * Asterisk

*		Asterisk, an UCI and WinBoard ^[1] compliant chess program written by Péter Horváth in C. Its development started in early 2002 ^[2], already released in March 2002 ^[3]. Asterisk is presumably the Windows successor of Péter's earlier MS-DOS program Robin. Since 2002, Asterisk played all six Hungarian Chessprogram Open, and was tied first at MASPV 2007, and runner-up at the MASPV 2008.

Etymology

Asterisk, from Late Latin asteriscus, from Ancient Greek ἀστερίσκος (asteriskos, “a little star, asterisk, used in manuscripts to mark passages”), diminutive of ἀστήρ (aster, “a star”) ^[4] . In computer science, the asterisk is commonly used as a wildcard character, or to denote pointers, repetition, or multiplication ^[5]. Inside the Portable Game Notation Standard, an asterisk character ("*") is a token by itself. It is used as one of the possible game termination markers. It indicates an incomplete game or a game with an unknown or otherwise unavailable result ^[6] .

Photos & Games

MASPV 2003, round 3, Asterisk - Merlin ^[7], Péter Horváth and Balázs Jákó ^[8]

[Event "MASPV 2003"]
[Site "Sopron, Hungary"]
[Date "2003.04.19"]
[Round "3"]
[White "Asterisk"]
[Black "Merlin V1.0"]
[Result "1-0"]
 
1.Nf3 Nf6 2.Nc3 d6 3.d4 d5 4.Bf4 Bf5 5.e3 c6 6.Bd3 e6 7.Bxf5 exf5
8.Qd3 Ne4 9.O-O Be7 10.a4 O-O 11.Ne2 Na6 12.Qb3 Qc8 13.Rfd1 Re8
14.c4 Nb4 15.Rac1 Qe6 16.c5 a5 17.Bc7 Bd8 18.Bxd8 Raxd8 19.Nf4 Qh6
20.Qa3 Re7 21.Qb3 Rde8 22.Nh3 Kh8 23.Ne5 Ng5 24.Nf4 Ne4 25.Nfd3 f6
26.Nf3 Nxd3 27.Rxd3 f4 28.Rf1 Qg6 29.exf4 Qf5 30.g3 Qh3 31.Re3 Qg4
32.Rfe1 Qh3 33.Qb6 Ra8 34.Nh4 g5 35.fxg5 fxg5 36.Nf3 Kg8 37.R1e2 Nd2
38.Nxd2 Rxe3 39.Rxe3 Qd7 40.Rb3 Rf8 41.Qxa5 Qe7 42.Rf3 Qe1+ 43.Kg2
Rxf3 44.Kxf3 Kf7 45.Qc7+ Kg6 46.Qxb7 Qxd2 47.Qxc6+ Kg7 48.Qxd5 Qxb2
49.Qxg5+ Kf7 50.Qf5+ Ke8 51.Qe4+ Kd8 52.Qd5+ Ke7 53.Qe5+ Kf7 54.Qf5+
Ke8 55.Qe6+ Kf8 56.Qf6+ Kg8 57.Qe6+ Kf8 58.Qf6+ Kg8 59.Qd8+ Kf7
60.Qd7+ Kf8 61.Qd6+ Kf7 62.Qd7+ Kf6 63.Qd8+ Kf7 64.Qc7+ Kg8 65.Qd7
h6 66.Qe8+ Kg7 67.Qe7+ Kh8 68.Qf8+ Kh7 69.Qf7+ Kh8 70.Qe8+ Kg7
71.Qd7+ Kf6 72.Qd8+ Kf7 73.Qc7+ Kf8 74.Qd7 Qc3+ 1-0

Forum Posts

new hungarian wb engine : Asterisk by WYx, Winboard Forum, March 05, 2002
Re: WB/UCI chronology pages updated and reworked by Péter Horváth, Winboard Forum, August 12, 2007

External Links

Chess Engine

Asterisk old homepage from Wayback Machine
Asterisk from WBEC Ridderkerk
Asterisk 0.6 in KCEC
Index of /chess/engines/Norbert's collection/Asterisk 0.6 compiled by Norbert Raimund Leisner, hosted by Kirill Kryukov

Misc

References

^ MASPV 2007
^ MASPV 2002
^ new hungarian wb engine : Asterisk by WYx, Winboard Forum, March 05, 2002
^ asterisk - Wiktionary
^ Asterisk from Wikipedia
^ Standard: Portable Game Notation Specification and Implementation Guide by Steven Edwards
^ MASPV 2003 - PGN, PGN has 0-1, MASPV 2003 results 1-0?
^ MASPV 2003 photos

What links here?

Page	Date Edited
Asterisk	Mar 24, 2016
Eigenmann Endgame Test	Jun 1, 2017
Engines	Mar 10, 2018
Hussar	Mar 27, 2016
MASPV 2002	Jan 9, 2013
MASPV 2003	Jan 9, 2013
MASPV 2004	Jan 9, 2013
MASPV 2007	May 5, 2013
MASPV 2008	May 5, 2013
MASPV 2009	May 6, 2013
Péter Horváth	Mar 24, 2016
Robin	Dec 15, 2017

Up one Level

Bestia

GerdIsenberg — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 17:15:26 GMT

Home * Engines * Bestia

		Bestia, a Chess Engine Communication Protocol compliant chess engine written by George Lyapko in Pascal and compiled with Delphi ^[1], first released in July 2000 ^[2], with executables to run under Windows, and more recently, to x86-64 Mac OS ^[3]. Beside the transposition table, Bestia features a pawn hash table, and is able to learn from its failures ^[4] ^[5]. Bestia participated at three Hungarian Chessprogram Open, and won two times operated by Gábor Szõts, the MASPV 2001 and the MASPV 2003, both with a 100% score.
Number of the beast ^[6]

Photos & Games

MASPV 2003, round 4, Bestia - Merlin ^[7] Gábor Szõts and Balázs Jákó ^[8]

[Event "MASPV 2003"]
[Site " Sopron, Hungary"]
[Date "2003.04.19"]
[Round "4"]
[White "Bestia_094"]
[Black "Merlin"]
[Result "1-0"]
 
1.d4 d6 2.e4 g6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.Be3 a6 5.Nf3 Bg7 6.a4 Nbd7 7.Bc4 O-O 8.e5 
dxe5 9.dxe5 Ng4 10.e6 Nde5 11.exf7+ Nxf7 12.Ng5 Qxd1+ 13.Rxd1 Ne5
14.Bd5 c6 15.Bb3 Kh8 16.O-O Nxg5 17.Bxg5 Bg4 18.f3 Bxf3 19.gxf3 Nxf3+
20.Rxf3 Rxf3 21.Bxe7 Re8 22.Rd7 Bxc3 23.bxc3 b6 24.Kg2 Rf5 25.Be6 Rf4
26.Bg5 Rff8 27.Bf7 Rxf7 28.Rxf7 Kg8 29.Rf6 Rc8 30.Be3 b5 31.a5 Kg7
32.Rd6 Kg8 33.Kf3 Rf8+ 34.Ke2 Rc8 35.Rd7 Re8 36.Ra7 Re4 37.Rxa6 Kf7
38.Rxc6 Ke8 39.Rb6 Ra4 40.Rxb5 Kd7 41.Kd3 Ra1 42.Rb7+ Kc8 43.Ra7 h5
44.a6 Kb8 45.Rb7+ Ka8 46.Rb6 Rd1+ 47.Ke2 Rd8 48.Rxg6 Rh8 49.h4 Kb8
50.a7+ Ka8 51.Bd4 Rf8 52.Rg5 Re8+ 53.Kd3 Rf8 54.c4 Rf3+ 55.Ke4 Rf8
56.Rxh5 Rc8 57.Re5 Rg8 58.h5 Rg4+ 59.Kd3 Rg3+ 60.Be3 Rg8 61.h6 Rc8
62.h7 Rh8 63.Rb5 1-0

Forum Posts

New WB engine "Bestia" available for download by George Lyapko, Winboard Forum, July 05, 2000
Surpising result from Bestia v0.2d by George Lyapko, Winboard Forum, September 06, 2000
Bestia v0.3d available by George Lyapko, Winboard Forum, September 26, 2000
Bestia lives up to its name by Dann Corbit, Winboard Forum, January 31, 2001
Bestia 0.3H verses Quark 1.15 Alpha by Dann Corbit, Winboard Forum, February 05, 2001 » Quark
Bestia 0.8 available for download by George Lyapko, Winboard Forum, July 20, 2001
Commented games Utzinger-Bestia 0.8 [40'/40] 1-0 by Kurt Utzinger, CCC, November 27, 2001
Stalemate trap(SOS-Delfi) by George Lyapko, Winboard Forum, December 18, 2001 » Stalemate, Test-Positions, SOS, Delfi
Which is the strongest Delphi chess program? by Andreas Herrmann, Winboard Forum, March 14, 2002 » Delphi
Bestia 0.90 vs Ufim 3.02 (1) 120'/40 (1/2) Commented game by Kurt Utzinger, Winboard Forum, March 04, 2003 » Ufim
Bestia 0.90 vs Ufim 3.02 (3) 120'/40 (1-0) Commented game by Kurt Utzinger, Winboard Forum, March 07, 2003
Bestia 0.90 vs Ufim 3.02 (5) 120'/40 [0-1] Commented game by Kurt Utzinger, Winboard Forum, March 08, 2003
Ufim 3.02 vs Bestia 090 (8) 120'/40 [1-0] Commented game by Kurt Utzinger, Winboard Forum, March 10, 2003
MASPV results - The champion is Bestia! by Gábor Szõts, Winboard Forum, April 22, 2003 » MASPV 2003
Olympiads 2004 : Bestia Nationality by Nicolas Normand, Winboard Forum, March 08, 2004
Re: How is learning triggered? by George Lyapko, Winboard Forum, May 25, 2006

External Links

Chess Engine

Free Winboard engine Bestia
Free Winboard engine Bestia from Wayback Machine
Bestia from WBEC Ridderkerk
Bestia 0.90 in CCRL 40/4
Bestia 0.90 in KCEC

Bestia Misc

Beast

References

^ MASPV 2001
^ New WB engine "Bestia" available for download by George Lyapko, Winboard Forum, July 05, 2000
^ Chess Engine List from Ron Murawski's Computer-Chess Wiki
^ Re: How is learning triggered? by George Lyapko, Winboard Forum, May 25, 2006
^ Bestia from WBEC Ridderkerk
^ The number of the beast is 666 by William Blake
^ MASPV 2003 - PGN
^ MASPV 2003 photos

What links here?

Page	Date Edited
Bestia	Jan 5, 2013
Engines	Mar 10, 2018
George Lyapko	Jan 14, 2013
Hungarian Chessprogram Open	Jan 6, 2013
MASPV 2001	Jan 9, 2013
MASPV 2003	Jan 9, 2013
MASPV 2007	May 5, 2013
Ufim	Mar 22, 2014

Up one level

Brute Force (Program)

GerdIsenberg — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 19:13:49 GMT

Home * Engines * Brute Force

		Brute Force, a chess program by Louis Kessler that participated in the 8th and 9th North American Computer Chess Championships in 1977 and 1978. Brute Force was a Tech like program, including such features of an iterative alpha-beta routine, a quiescence routine using swap-off values, and an evaluation function based on the opponent's mobility ^[1]. At the 9th NACCC, it suffered from an "en passant bug" twice ^[2], which turned out a wrong implementation due to Kessler's misinterpretation of the rules ^[3].
Brute Force Issue 1 ^[4]

Selected Games

ACM 1977, round 4, Brute Force - 8080 Chess

[Event "ACM 1977"]
[Site "Seattle USA"]
[Date "1977.10.17"]
[Round "4"]
[White "Brute Force"]
[Black "8080 Chess"]
[Result "1-0"]
 
1.d4 d5 2.Nc3 Nc6 3.Bf4 Nf6 4.Nb5 e5 5.Bxe5 Bb4+ 6.c3 Nxe5 7.dxe5 Bxc3+ 8.Nxc3 Ne4 
9.Nxe4 dxe4 10.Qa4+ Bd7 11.Qxe4 b5 12.g4 O-O 13.Bg2 c6 14.h4 a5 15.O-O-O Ra6 16.Qd4 
f5 17.Qxd7 Qxd7 18.Rxd7 fxg4 19.Rd6 Rxf2 20.Bxc6 Rf5 21.Bd5+ Kf8 22.Rxa6 Rxe5 23.e4 
a4 24.Rb6 g5 25.hxg5 Kg7 26.Rb7+ Kg6 27.Rhxh7 Kxg5 28.Rxb5 Kf4 29.Ra5 a3 30.Rf7+ Ke3
31.Rxa3+ Kd4 32.Rg7 Kc5 33.Rxg4 Kd6 34.Ra6+ Kc5 35.Nf3 Re7 36.Rc6+ Kb4 37.e5+ Kb5 
38.Nd4+ Ka5 39.Nb3+ 1-0

External Links

Chess Program

A Memorial to BRUTE FORCE

Misc

Comics

Brute Force (Volume) - Comic Vine
Unsung Characters of Comicdom: Brute Force | ComicAttack by Josh, February 12, 2010
80 Page Giant: It Came From the Dollar Bin: Brute Force by Trixter, July 10, 2012
Paul Scheer And Nick Giovannetti Talk Bringing Brute Force To Deadpool Bi-Annual #1 | Comicbook.com by Jamie Lovett, August 24, 2014

References

^ David Levy (1978). ACM '78. ICCA Newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 1
^ Pech für den Weltmeister?, February 02, 1979, Computerwoche 5/1979 (German)
^ Quote by Louis Kessler from A Memorial to BRUTE FORCE:
As far as the en passant bug goes, it turns out this was my own misinterpretation of the rules. I read that "The en passant capture must be done on the very next turn, or the right to do so is lost”. I had interpreted that as losing the right to do any en passant for the remainder of the game, not just for that one specific en passant. My personal lack of experience in tournament chess led to that, and it cost me.
^ "Brute Force Issue 1", Marvel Comic edited by Tom DeFalco, August 1990, Cover Image from 80 Page Giant: It Came From the Dollar Bin: Brute Force by Trixter, July 10, 2012
^ Chess In The Cinema - Chess scenes from the movie Brute Force (Burt Lancaster)

What links here?

Page	Date Edited
ACM 1977	Dec 22, 2017
ACM 1978	Dec 23, 2017
Brute Force (Program)	Sep 7, 2017
Brute-Force	Jul 27, 2017
En passant	Jan 16, 2018
Engine Testing	Feb 1, 2018
Engines	Mar 10, 2018
Louis Kessler	Jun 5, 2012
Saitek Brute Force	Oct 9, 2015

Up one level

Brutus

GerdIsenberg — Sat, 24 Dec 2016 20:29:56 GMT

Home * Engines * Brutus

		Brutus, a FPGA based chess entity developed by Chrilly Donninger, supported by Alex Kure and Ulf Lorenz. Brutus consists of usual PCs with Xilinx Virtex FPGA boards inside, and was designed in dependence on the Belle and Deep Thought chess machines. In fact, it was Ken Thompson who initiated and supported the FPGA chess project. After the WCCC 2003, Brutus evolved to Hydra.
Brutus ^[1]

How it started

In early 2000, Ken Thompson told his friend Frederic Friedel about interesting hardware developments concerning FPGAs, and asked whether he was aware of a programmer who could build such a kind of "People's Deep Blue". ChessBase, surely interested in the commercial aspects of such a machine, engaged Chrilly Donninger for the development of a FPGA based chess hardware and program. The work on Brutus started in October 2000, one year later it could calculate its first position, and in January 2002, it played its first game. Soon, programmer, chess expert and opening book author Alex Kure, and in November 2002, Ulf Lorenz, responsible for the surrounding distributed search, joined the Brutus team, with ChessBase and the University of Paderborn cooperating on the project ^[2].

Etymology

The name Brutus was chosen by Matthias Wüllenweber due to his spot on Ancient Rome. The idea was a "People's Deep Blue" to dethrone "Caesar" Garry Kasparov ^[3].

Description

Brutus partially ran on PCs and partially on FPGA cards. Opposed to a pure move generation approach, and to diminish PCI communication overhead with the PC, the hardware was designed also to perform a kind of iterative search. Brutus’ FPGA definition was written in the Verilog hardware description language, and uses 67 out of 96 BlockRAMs, 534 of 24,576 Flip-Flops, and 18,403 of 24,576 LUTs of the Virtex board ^[4].

Brutus on a Xilinx Virtex V405E FPGA development board ^[5]

FPGA Search

Brutus calculates the last 3 plies of an n-ply search on the FPGA side, inclusively quiescence search and evaluations. It essentially contains a big piece of combinatorial logic, controlled by a finite state machine (FSM) with 54 states for the search. An upper bound for the number of cycles per search node is 9. The Figure below shows a simplified version of the FSM that controls the search on the FPGA card. States must not be interpreted as time points when functions are called. E.g. the move generator and the evaluation are never called in that sense. They are running all the time ^[6].

Search in Hardware: Simplified state diagram ^[7]

Evaluation

The evaluation consists of many small features which are summed up by one large adder tree. All features are determined simultaneously.

Move Generation

The Belle like move generator consists of the generate aggressor module and the generate victim module, both instantiate 64 square modules, one for each square. The squares send piece-signals if any, respectively forwarding the signals of sliding pieces. Each square can output the signal ’victim found’ to indicate the ’victim’ is target square of a pseudo-legal move. The collection of all ’victim found’ signals is the input for a comparator tree, an arbiter, which selects the most attractive, not yet examined victim. The generate aggressor module takes the arbiter’s output as input and sends the signal of a super-piece from the target to find one or more origin squares. Selection criteria are the values of attacked pieces and whether or not a move is a killer move.

Distributed Search

The most sensitive and important part of Brutus search algorithm is distributed among several standard PCs, connected via a high-speed Myrienet. One of the processors receives the current chess position and basically begins a sequential alpha beta search. Idle processors send work requests randomly around the net - when a working processor captures such a request, it distributes part of his own (sub-) problem. Using a tricky messaging system between the processors, the work is dynamically balanced with little search overhead. After a while, all processors have something useful to do. A processor generates approximately 100,000 searches on a FPGA board per second ^[8].

Tournament Play

A Brutus prototype had its debut at the IPCCC 2002 with an expected 50% score, but Brutus quickly improved and already played a strong WCCC 2002 in Maastricht, where it became third only loosing a spectacular game from later champion Junior. At the IPCCC 2003, Brutus became third again, then, in August 2003, it won the 11th Grandmaster Tournament in Lippstadt with 9 out of 11 ^[9], and seemed dedicated to win the upcoming WCCC 2003 in Graz, but after two consecutive losses from Shredder and Deep Junior in round 5 and 6, Brutus finished disappointing fourth. As a consequence, ChessBase went out of the project, which then continued under the patronage of the Pal Group of Companies ^[10] under its new name Hydra.

Photos & Games

IPCCC 2002

IPCCC 2002: Alex Kure, Chrilly Donninger, Mathias Feist, Brutus vs. Fritz 0 - 1 ^[11] ^[12]

[Event "IPCCC 2002"]
[Site "Paderborn GER"]
[Date "2002.03.03"]
[Round "07"]
[White "Brutus-XPa"]
[Black "Fritz"]
[Result "0-1"]
[ECO "E34"]
 
1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 Bb4 4.Qc2 d5 5.cxd5 Qxd5 6.Nf3 Qf5 7.Qxf5 exf5 8.a3 Be7 9.Bf4 c6 
10.e3 Nbd7 11.Bc4 Nb6 12.Ba2 Be6 13.Be5 h6 14.Ke2 a5 15.Rhc1 a4 16.Kf1 O-O 17.Ne2 Ne4 
18.Bxe6 fxe6 19.Nf4 Kf7 20.Bxg7 Kxg7 21.Nxe6+ Kf6 22.Nxf8 Bxf8 23.Ke2 Bd6 24.g3 h5 
25.Nh4 Nd5 26.f3 Ng5 27.Kd3 Rd8 28.e4 Ne7 29.Ke3 Bc7 30.Nxf5 Nxf5+ 31.exf5 h4 32.f4 
Re8+ 33.Kd3 Nf3 34.d5 Nxh2 35.dxc6 hxg3 36.cxb7 Bxf4 37.Rc4 Kxf5 38.Rxa4 g2 39.Ra5+ Kf6 
40.Ra6+ Kf7 41.Ra4 Bb8 42.Ra5 Kf6 43.Ra6+ Kf5 44.Ra5+ Kf4 45.Ra6 Nf3 46.Rf6+ Kg3 47.Rg6+ 
Kf2 48.Rg7 g1=R 49.Raxg1 Nxg1 50.Rf7+ Nf3 51.a4 Kg3 52.Rg7+ Kf4 53.Rf7+ Kg4 54.Rh7 Ng5 
55.Rd7 Kf5 56.a5 Ke6 57.Rd4 Nf3 58.Ra4 Kd5 59.a6 Ba7 60.Kc3 Re3+ 61.Kc2 Nd4+ 62.Kd2 Nc6
63.Kc2 Kc5 64.Kd2 Kb5 65.Ra1 Re7 66.Rc1 Rd7+ 67.Ke1 Nb4 68.Ke2 Kxa6 0-1

WCCC 2002

WCCC 2002, round 6, Brutus - Deep Junior ^[13] ^[14]:

[Event "WCCC 2002"]
[Site "Maastricht, The Netherlands"]
[Date "2002.07.09"]
[Round "6"]
[White "Brutus"]
[Black "Deep Junior"]
[Result "0-1"]
 
1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 a6 6.Be2 e5 7.Nb3 Be7 8.O-O O-O 9.Kh1 Qc7 
10.f4 b5 11.fxe5 dxe5 12.Bg5 Nbd7 13.Bd3 Bb7 14.Qf3 b4 15.Ne2 a5 16.Ng3 g6 17.Rad1 a4 
18.Nd2 Ba6 19.Ne2 Rfc8 20.b3 Kg7 21.Qh3 h5 22.Qf3 Qc6 23.Bc4 Bxc4 24.Nxc4 Qe6 25.c3 
axb3 26.axb3 Rxc4 27.bxc4 b3 28.h3 b2 29.Ng3 Qxc4 30.Rb1 Rb8 31.Rfd1 Rb3 32.Rd3 Nc5 
33.Re3 Rb6 34.Re2 Na4 35.Rd2 Qa2 36.Rdd1 Rc6 37.Ne2 Qc4  38.Rf1 Rb6 39.Rbd1 Kf8 
40.Bh6+ Ke8 41.Bg7 Qxe4 42.Bxf6 Qxf3 43.gxf3 Rxf6 44.Rb1 Ba3 45.f4 exf4 46.Rf3 g5 
47.c4 Bc5 48.Rd3 g4 49.Rb3 Kd7 50.Rf1 f3 51.Ng3 Rb6 52.Rxb6 Nxb6 0-1

WCCC 2003

WCCC 2003, Brutus - Diep ^[15], Vincent Diepeveen, Ulf Lorenz and Chrilly Donninger ^[16]

[Event "WCCC 2003"]
[Site "Graz, Austria"]
[Date "2003.11.27"]
[Round "8"]
[White "Brutus"]
[Black "Diep"]
[Result "1-0"]
 
1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 a6 6.Be3 e5 7.Nb3 Be6 8.f3 Nbd7 9.Qd2 b5 
10.a4 b4 11.Nd5 Bxd5 12.exd5 Nb6 13.Bxb6 Qxb6 14.a5 Qb7 15.Bc4 Be7 16.Ra4 Rb8 17.Nc1 
O-O 18.b3 Bd8 19.Na2 Nd7 20.Kd1 Qc8 21.Nxb4 Nc5 22.Ra2 Bg5 23.Nc6 Qxc6 24.dxc6 Bxd2 
25.Kxd2 Rfc8 26.Bd5 Ne6 27.Rd1 Nd8 28.c3 Kf8 29.g4 Ke7 30.h4 Rc7 31.Ra4 f6 32.h5 Nxc6 
33.Rc4 Kd7 34.b4 h6 35.f4 exf4 36.Rxf4 Ne5 37.Re1 Rb5 38.Bb3 Rbb7 39.Re3 Rb8 40.Rd4 
Rbc8 41.Bd5 Rc4 42.Rde4 R4c7 43.Kc2 Rb8 44.Rd4 Rb5 45.Kb3 Nc6 46.Be6+ Ke7 47.Bc4+ Re5 
48.Rdd3 Ra7 49.Bd5 Nd8 50.Re4 Ne6 51.Rd2 Kd7 52.c4 Nc7 53.Red4 Nxd5 54.Rxd5 Rxd5 
55.Rxd5 Ke6 56.Kc3 Ra8 57.Kd4 g6 58.hxg6 Rg8 59.c5 dxc5+ 60.bxc5 Rxg6 61.c6 Rxg4+ 
62.Kc5 Ra4 63.Rd8 Rxa5+ 64.Kb6 Ra2 65.c7 Rc2 66.c8=Q+ Rxc8 67.Rxc8 Kf5 68.Rh8 Kg5 
69.Kxa6 h5 70.Kb5 h4 71.Kc4 Kg4 72.Kd4 Kg3 73.Ke3 Kg4 74.Rh7 h3 75.Rh6 f5 76.Rg6+ 
Kh4 77.Kf4 1-0

Namesake

Brutus by Stephan Vermeire

Publications

Eric Hallsworth (2002). The Brutus Project. Selective Search 101, pp. 33, pdf hosted by Mike Watters
Wenzel Mraček (2003). Zu Besuch bei Christian „Chrilly“ Donninger. pdf (German)
Chrilly Donninger, Alex Kure, Ulf Lorenz (2004). Parallel Brutus: The First Distributed, FPGA Accelerated Chess Program. IPDPS’04

Forum Posts

Any details about Brutus? by Peter McKenzie, CCC, February 27, 2002
BRUTUS by Elvis, ChessBits-Computerschachforum, February 28, 2002 (German)
Junior Verses Brutus --> Rxc4 "The best PC chess move ever?" by Dann Corbit, CCC, July 31, 2002
Suturb - Bob by Frank Phillips, CCC, January 22, 2003
Re: What happens to the BRUTUS Project by Dr. Donninger ? by Chrilly Donninger, CCC, April 01, 2003
Status of Brutus? by O. Veli, CCC, July 26, 2003
Brutus has won the Lippstadt Tournament by Tomas Casanovas Martinez, CCC, August 16, 2003
Go Brutus!! by Pete Rihaczek, CCC, November 24, 2003

External Links

Chess

Brutus' ICGA Tournaments
Comp Brutus chess games - 365Chess.com
Brutus - Was ist das denn?, ChessBase News, March 07, 2002 (German)
What is Brutus?, ChessBase News, March 20, 2002
Parallele Schachprogrammierung, ChessBase News, September, 16, 2003 (German)
Schach + PC - Brutus by Peter Schreiner, Schachclub Leinzell, April 2002 (German)
Brutus and Hydra by Ulf Lorenz, University of Paderborn

Maastricht

Vormärz by Chrilly Donninger, Old CSVN site (German) ^[17]

Lippstadt

Brutus mit Auftaktsieg, ChessBase News, August 08, 2003 (German)
Brutus in Lippstadt mit zweitem Sieg, ChessBase News, August 09, 2003 (German)
Grandmasters brutalised in Lippstadt, ChessBase News, August 10, 2003
Spielen wie Tal, ChessBase News, August 10, 2003 (German)
Brutus auch nur ein Mensch, ChessBase News, August 11, 2003 (German)
Brutus remis, ChessBase News, August 12, 2003 (German)
Brutus reloaded, ChessBase News, August 13, 2003 (German)
Brutus: Held mit programmierter Götterdämmerung?, ChessBase News, August 14, 2003 (German)
Brutus vor Maiwald und Cyborski, ChessBase News, August 15, 2003 (German)
Brutus marschiert, ChessBase News, August 16, 2003 (German)
Brutus mit GM-Norm, ChessBase News, August 17, 2003 (German)

Graz

Brutus defeats Fritz in round four, ChessBase News, November 24, 2003
Computer Championship: Shredder stops Brutus, ChessBase News, November 25, 2003

Brutus

References

^ Marble bust of Brutus, at the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme in the National Museum of Rome, Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger from Wikipedia
^ Brutus and Hydra by Ulf Lorenz, University of Paderborn
^ Schach + PC - Brutus by Peter Schreiner, Schachclub Leinzell, April 2002 (German)
^ Chrilly Donninger, Alex Kure, Ulf Lorenz (2004). Parallel Brutus: The First Distributed, FPGA Accelerated Chess Program. IPDPS’04
^ Brutus - Was ist das denn?, ChessBase News, March 07, 2002
^ Chrilly Donninger, Alex Kure, Ulf Lorenz (2004). Parallel Brutus: The First Distributed, FPGA Accelerated Chess Program. IPDPS’04
^ Chrilly Donninger, Alex Kure, Ulf Lorenz (2004). Parallel Brutus: The First Distributed, FPGA Accelerated Chess Program. IPDPS’04
^ Parallele Schachprogrammierung, ChessBase News, September, 16, 2003 (German)
^ Performance ELO by Lei, Shiann-Tzong, CCC, August 16, 2003
^ Pal Group of Companies
^ FSV personal chess service - Paderborn 2002 Pics (from Sunday, 03.03.2002) by Torsten Schoop
^ Downloads | IPCCC | Games, CSVN site
^ Maastricht 2002 - Chess - Round 6 - Game 6 (ICGA Tournaments)
^ Junior Verses Brutus --> Rxc4 "The best PC chess move ever?" by Dann Corbit, CCC, July 31, 2002
^ Graz 2003 - Chess - Round 8 - Game 6 (ICGA Tournaments)
^ Live from Graz – Fritz and Shredder lead, ChessBase News, November, 27, 2003
^ Vormärz from Wikipedia

What links here?

Page	Date Edited
Alex Kure	Aug 27, 2016
Belle	Jan 18, 2018
Brutus	Dec 24, 2016
Brutus NL	Aug 22, 2016
Caesar	May 22, 2016
Chrilly Donninger	Dec 19, 2016
Engines	Mar 10, 2018
FPGA	Jul 9, 2016
GridChess	Jul 13, 2016
Hydra	Aug 17, 2016
IPCCC 2002	May 31, 2014
IPCCC 2003	Aug 17, 2016
List (Program)	Jan 7, 2016
Move Generation	Jan 29, 2018
MVV-LVA	Oct 26, 2017
Nimzo	Dec 30, 2017
Ulf Lorenz	Dec 22, 2016
University of Paderborn	Aug 17, 2014
WCCC 2002	Nov 24, 2017
WCCC 2003	Apr 2, 2017
Wolfgang Zugrav	Jul 13, 2016

Up one Level

Brutus NL

GerdIsenberg — Mon, 22 Aug 2016 15:30:26 GMT

Home * Engines * Brutus

		Brutus (Brutus Chess), a Chess Engine Communication Protocol compatible open source chess engine by Stephan Vermeire and Maurizio Platino, since Version 8 also UCI compliant. Brutus participated at the CPT 2008 and the CPT 2010, the over the board Chess Programmers Tournaments organized by Richard Pijl. Brutus is a bitboard engine, determines sliding piece attacks with magic bitboards, uses alpha-beta with transposition table and null-move pruning, and supports SMP search ^[1]. Brutus 8.05 is able to read ctg bookfiles ^[2].
Brutus Chess ^[3] ^[4] ^[5]

Namesake

Brutus, the FPGA program by Chrilly Donninger

Forum Posts

Brutus v8.01 available at new website by Stephan Vermeire, Winboard Forum, November 14, 2009
Brutus v8.5 released by Stephan Vermeire, Winboard Forum, January 25, 2010

External Links

Chess Engine

Misc

References

^ Brutus' Homepage
^ Brutus v8.5 released by Stephan Vermeire, Winboard Forum, January 25, 2010
^ Brutus' Homepage
^ Asterix from Wikipedia
^ Albert Uderzo from Wikipedia

What links here?

Page	Date Edited
Brutus	Dec 24, 2016
Brutus NL	Aug 22, 2016
CCC 2009	Apr 29, 2015
CPT 2008	Nov 6, 2014
CPT 2010	Jan 17, 2013
CTG	Aug 22, 2016
DayDreamer	Aug 22, 2016
Engines	Mar 10, 2018
IOCSC 2010	Jul 13, 2013
Stephan Vermeire	Mar 29, 2015

Up one Level

Calculon

GerdIsenberg — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 17:08:05 GMT

Home * Engines * Calculon

		Calculon, named after the Futurama character, is a Java chess engine developed by Barry Smith. It is open source, licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 and currently hosted at GitHub ^[1]. Calculon is UCI compatible, uses bitboards as basic data structure, and applies Negamax alpha-beta. The engine regularly plays on ICC under the name CalculonX and has Blitz/Standard ratings there around the 1750 mark ^[2] .
Calculon ^[3]

External Links

Chess Engine

Misc

References

What links here?

Page	Date Edited
Calculon	Nov 5, 2014
Engines	Mar 10, 2018

Up one Level

Clever & Smart

GerdIsenberg — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 17:48:13 GMT

Home * Engines * Shredder * Clever & Smart

		Clever & Smart, a chess playing program by Stefan Meyer-Kahlen as parallel search and automatic triple-brain experiment based on the 3-Hirn ideas by Ingo Althöfer ^[1]. In dependence on the German conversion of the Spanish comic Mortadelo y Filemón by Francisco Ibáñez Talavera, Clever (Mortadelo aka Fred Clever) & Smart (Filemón Pi aka Phil Pi or Jeff Smart) were two rather different versions of Shredder. Their move proposals, and additional data from their search processes are given to an automatic control program, the Boss (Superintendente Vicente aka El Súper or Mister L), which makes the final choice and controls the time ^[2] . Clever & Smart played the IPCCC 1998 in Paderborn where it ran on a Dual processor PC, and became runner-up behind Nimzo98 due to less resistance points.
Mortadelo y Filemón ^[3]

Forum Posts

Re: 7th International Paderborn Computer Chess Championships by Ingo Althöfer, r.g.c.c, February 18, 1998
Clever & Smart by Ted Summers, CCC, January 19, 2017

External Links

Mort & Phil from Wikipedia
Mortadelo y Filemón from Wikipedia.es (Spanish)
Clever & Smart from Wikipedia.de (German)
La gran aventura de Mortadelo y Filemón from Wikipedia
Mortadelo Wiki (Spanish)


					Mortadelo (Clever)		Filemón (Smart)		Superintendente Vicente

References

^ The 3-Hirn Setting by Ingo Althöfer
^ Re: 7th International Paderborn Computer Chess Championships by Ingo Althöfer, r.g.c.c, February 18, 1998
^ Mortadelo y Filemón representados en Fallas de Valencia (Spanish)

What links here?

Page	Date Edited
Clever & Smart	Jan 20, 2017
Engines	Mar 10, 2018
IPCCC 1998	Feb 25, 2018
PuppetMaster	Sep 17, 2015
Shredder	Jan 21, 2018
SmarThink	Feb 2, 2018

Up one Level

CookieCat

GerdIsenberg — Tue, 15 Nov 2016 10:56:17 GMT

Home * Engines * CookieCat

		CookieCat, an educational open source chess program by Steven Edwards designed for pedagogical purposes, written in Free Pascal ^[1]. CookieCat evolved from the earlier Bozochess project ^[2] announced in October 2011 ^[3], renamed in December 2011 ^[4], and first released in January 2012 ^[5] under the permissive BSD License. However, Steven's wish that his CookieCat should be easily searchable on the net without too many false positives didn't fulfill when Steven Universe came up with a fictional character ^[6] and ice cream ^[7] in 2013.
Spooky ^[8]

Description

Bitboard Infrastructure

Description

CookieCat utilizes bitboards as basic data structure to represent the board. Inside CookieCat's source code ^[9], there are three groups of routines named after some of Steven's feline companions. There are the Lucky positional evaluator routines, the Smokey mate finder routines, and the Spooky general search routines. The names were chosen not so much to be cute, but rather to make it easier for others to identify the program's functional organization ^[10]. CookieCat features five hash-tables, beside the main transposition table, an endgame tablebase cache, a pawn hash table, evaluation hash table, and a dedicated perft hash table, and can further probe an opening book ^[11] and Edwards' tablebases.

Bitboard Infrastructure

Bitboards are defined as union (variable structure) of four 16-bit words and one 64 bit value:

    bbtype =
      record
        case Boolean of
          False: (wvec: array [bbwtype] of bbwspantype); { Array of bitboard words }
          True:  (bv64: ui64type)                        { Unsigned 64 bit value }
      end;

Population count and BitScan rely on 16-bit lookups:

  function BbCount(var bb: bbtype): cctype; inline;
    var
      myresult: cctype;
      bbw: bbwtype;
  begin
    with bb do
      begin
        myresult := 0;
        for bbw := bbwmin to bbwmax do
          myresult := myresult + bitcountvec[wvec[bbw]]
      end;
    BbCount := myresult
  end; { BbCount }
 
  function BbFirstSq(var bb: bbtype): sqxtype; inline;
    var
      myresult: sqxtype;
      bbwindex: Integer;
      wordfirstbit: Integer;
  begin
    with bb do
      begin
        myresult := sqnil;
        bbwindex := 0;
        while (myresult = sqnil) and (bbwindex < bbwlen) do
          begin
            wordfirstbit := bitfirstvec[wvec[bbwindex]];
            if wordfirstbit >= 0 then
              myresult := sqxtype(wordfirstbit + (bbwindex * bbwbitlen))
            else
              Inc(bbwindex)
          end
      end;
    BbFirstSq := myresult
  end; { BbFirstSq }

Spooky

CookieCat's search dubbed Spooky is implemented as iterative search using a finite-state machine as nested procedure inside SpookyFindMove, which structure is outlined in following snippet:

  { ***** Spooky search routines ***** }
  procedure SpookyFindMove(var ssc: ssctype);
    procedure SpookyPrepareRoot;
    procedure SpookyIterationSequence;
      procedure SpookyIterate;
        procedure SpookySearch;
          procedure SpookyLimitTestNode;
          procedure SpookyMovePick;
            procedure SpookyOrderMoves;
            procedure SpookyPickThis(index: Integer);
          procedure SpookyMinimax;
        begin  { SpookySearch }
          with ssc do
            while pirvec[ply].nss <> nssexit do
              case pirvec[ply].nss of
                nssplystart:    { Search state: Initialize processing at this node }
                nssfirdrawtest: { Search state: Draw tests for fiftymoves/insufficient/repetition }
                nsstbprobe:     { Search state: Probe the tablebases }
                nssstandtest:   { Search state: Gainer (QSearch ed.) search stand-pat evaluation and test }
                nssgenerate:    { Search state: Move generation }
                nssmovepick:    { Search state: Move pick }
                nssexecute:     { Search state: Execute the move and advance one ply }
                nssretract:     { Search state: Retreat one ply and retract the move }
                nsspostscan:    { Search state: Post move scan operations }
                nssplyfinish:   { Search state: Final processing for this node }
        end;  { SpookySearch }
      end; { SpookyIterate }
    end; { SpookyIterationSequence }
  end; { SpookyFindMove }

Smokey

Smokey is CookieCat's iterative mate finder with nested procedures outlined below:

  { ***** Smokey mate finder routines ***** }
  procedure SmokeyFindMate(var ssc: ssctype; fmvc: Integer);
    procedure SmokeySearch;
      procedure SmokeyApplyKillerBonus;
    begin
      with ssc do
        while pirvec[ply].nss <> nssexit do
          case pirvec[ply].nss of
            nssplystart:
            nsstermtest:
            nssgenerate:
            nssmovepick:
            nssexecute:
            nssretract:
            nsspostscan:
    end; { SmokeySearch }
 end; { SmokeyFindMate }

Lucky

Lucky, CookieCat's evaluation function with evaluation hash table and pawn hash table considers material, pawn structure with focus on passed pawns ^[12], and piece mobility.

Download

^[13]

CookieCat.tar
- Details
- Download
- 468 KB

Forum Posts

2011

Announcement: The Bozochess Project by Steven Edwards, CCC, October 05, 2011
Release date target by Steven Edwards, CCC, October 16, 2011
BozoChess Monday release schedule by Steven Edwards, CCC, December 12, 2011
The name change by Steven Edwards, CCC, December 16, 2011
Number sequence puzzle by Steven Edwards, CCC, December 16, 2011 » Endgame Tablebases ^[14]
CookieCat Monday release schedule by Steven Edwards, CCC, December 19, 2011
Tablebase class name list available by Steven Edwards, CCC, December 19, 2011 » Endgame Tablebases
CookieCat sample games by Steven Edwards, CCC, December 24, 2011
CookieCat goes mulithreaded by Steven Edwards, CCC, December 31, 2011 » Perft

2012 ...

CookieCat's opening book implementation by Steven Edwards, CCC, January 05, 2012 » Opening Book
CookieCat's pawn structure code by Steven Edwards, CCC, January 07, 2012
CookieCat's early search termination by Steven Edwards, CCC, January 07, 2012
CookieCat and Cookie Cat by Steven Edwards, CCC, January 08, 2012
CookieCat source via the net by Steven Edwards, CCC, January 26, 2012
CookieCat and perft by Steven Edwards, CCC, October 14, 2012
For a limited time, two sources by Steven Edwards, CCC, January 22, 2013 » Myopic

External Links

References

^ Free Pascal wiki
^ Release date target by Steven Edwards, CCC, October 16, 2011
^ Announcement: The Bozochess Project by Steven Edwards, CCC, October 05, 2011
^ The name change by Steven Edwards, CCC, December 16, 2011
^ CookieCat source via the net by Steven Edwards, CCC, January 26, 2012
^ Cookie Cat (character) | Steven Universe Wiki
^ Cookie Cat | Steven Universe Wiki
^ Image from The first Spooky and the fifth Smokey (April 7, 1935) from The Birth of Smokey Stover - First Puffs (1935), Bill Holman Comics, Copyright, 1935, by Chicago Tribune, New York News Syndicate Inc., supplied by Carl Linich, posted by Paul Tumey, April 24, 2012
^ Description is based on the source code - CookieCat.pas
^ CookieCat and Cookie Cat by Steven Edwards, CCC, January 08, 2012
^ CookieCat's opening book implementation by Steven Edwards, CCC, January 05, 2012
^ CookieCat's pawn structure code by Steven Edwards, CCC, January 07, 2012
^ Source code courtesy Steven Edwards
^ A018214 - OEIS | Alkane (or paraffin) numbers

What links here?

Page	Date Edited
BitScan	Sep 10, 2017
Bobcat	Jun 27, 2017
Chess 0.5	Nov 20, 2016
CookieCat	Nov 15, 2016
Endgame Tablebases	Mar 6, 2018
Engines	Mar 10, 2018
Murka	Nov 11, 2016
Myopic	Nov 11, 2016
Opening Book	Feb 26, 2018
Pascal	Nov 28, 2016
Spector	Nov 11, 2016
Steven Edwards	Aug 26, 2017
Symbolic	May 8, 2017
WildCat	Nov 11, 2016

Up one level

Delfi

GerdIsenberg — Thu, 07 Jan 2016 18:39:08 GMT

Home * Engines * Delfi

		Delfi, a strong WinBoard and UCI compliant chess engine written by Fabio Cavicchio in Pascal with x86 inline assembly, compiled with Delphi, first released in August 2001 ^[1]. Delfi is distributed commercially within a software suite as Delfi Trainer, along with an own "2.5D" chess GUI, a ergonomic 2D graphics board in Bird's-eye view and pieces with 3D-effect, and a position trainer ^[2] . The pure Winboard/UCI engine with some restrictions is further available for free. Formerly an open source engine, Fabio closed the sources past the still available version 2.51, which has a license allowing modification for personal use ^[3].
Delfi's 2.5D Board ^[4]

Description

Delfi uses the vector attacks approach of a board representation with a 16x16 board, combining the property of the 10x12 board with its surrounding ranks and files with the property that a square difference uniquely maps a vector in the Chebyshev vector space of a chessboard. Delfi applies PVS alpha-beta with null move-, futility- and history pruning. Dual core processors are supported using a parallel search with a shared hash table.

Tournament Play

Delfi won all the six Campionato Italiano per Programmi Scacchistici (CIPS) championships it played, from 2002 until 2007, and further won the Chess Computer Cup 2005, and 2008. At the WCCC 2006 in Turin, Delfi performed with respectable 5½/11.

Photos & Games

CIPS 2002

CIPS 2002 round 2: Marco Pagnoncelli and Fabio Cavicchio, CyberPagno vs Delfi ^[5] ^[6]

[Event "CIPS 2002"]
[Site "Pontedera"]
[Date "2002.06.01"]
[Round "2"]
[White "CyberPagno 1.0beta 1.6"]
[Black "Delfi 3.1"]
[Result "0-1"]
 
1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.exd5 exd5 4.Nf3 Bg4 5.h3 Bh5 6.Qe2+ Ne7 7.Nc3 Nc6 8.g4 Bg6
9.Bf4 h5 10.gxh5 Bxh5 11.Nb5 Rc8 12.O-O-O g6 13.Bg2 Bg7 14.c3 a6 15.Na3 O-O
16.Kb1 Nf5 17.Qd2 b5 18.Bg5 Qd7 19.Nc2 Rb8 20.Qd3 b4 21.b3 bxc3 22.Qxc3 Ncxd4
23.Ncxd4 Bxf3 24.Bxf3 Nxd4 25.Bh6 Qf5+ 26.Rd3 Bxh6 27.Qxd4 Bg7 28.Bg4 Bxd4
29.Bxf5 c5 30.Bg4 Rbd8 31.f4 Rfe8 32.Bf3 Re6 33.Rf1 Rf6 34.Bg2 Rf5 35.Kc2 a5
36.Rdd1 Kh7 37.Rde1 a4 38.Kd3 Rb8 39.Rb1 axb3 40.axb3 Bg7 41.Kd2 Bh6 42.Kc2 Ra8
43.b4 c4 44.Ra1 Rxa1 45.Rxa1 d4 46.Rf1 Kg8 47.Be4 Rb5 48.Rd1 Bg7 49.Rb1 Rh5
50.Bg2 Rf5 51.Rf1 Bf6 52.Be4 Rb5 53.Rb1 Kf8 54.Bc6 Rh5 55.Bg2 Rf5 56.Rf1 Ke7
57.Be4 Rb5 58.Rb1 Bg7 59.Bg2 Rf5 60.Rf1 Kd6 61.Be4 Rb5 62.Rb1 Rh5 63.Bg2 Rf5
64.Rf1 Bh6 65.Rf3 Bxf4 66.Rf1 Rf6 67.Rf3 c3 68.Rf2 Ke5 69.b5 Rb6 70.Bc6 f5
71.Rg2 g5 72.Kd3 Bd2 73.Re2+ Be3 74.Rg2 Rb8 75.Ra2 Kd6 76.Ra6 Rf8 77.Ra7 Rh8
78.Bg2 Rb8 79.Ra6+ Kc5 80.Rf6 Kxb5 81.Rxf5+ Kb4 82.Bc6 Rb6 83.Be8 Rb7 84.Bc6
Rb8 85.Rf7 Kc5 86.Bb7 Rh8 87.Bg2 Rb8 88.Bb7 Kd6 89.Rf6+ Ke5 90.Rf7 Rh8 91.Rf3
Bf4 92.Ba6 g4 93.Rf2 gxh3 94.Re2+ Be3 95.Rh2 Bg1 96.Rh1 h2 97.Bc4 Rb8 98.Kc2
Rb2+ 99.Kd1 Rd2+ 100.Kc1 Be3 101.Bd3 Rg2+ 102.Kd1 Rg1+ 103.Kc2 Rxh1 104.Kb3 Re1
105.Kc4 h1=Q 106.Kc5 Qd5+ 107.Kb6 c2 108.Bxc2 d3+ 109.Kc7 dxc2 110.Kc8 Qc6+
111.Kb8 Rb1# 0-1

WCCC 2006

^[7]

Ikarus

WCCC 2006, round 4, Delfi - Ikarus ^[8], Munjong Kolss (back), Fabio Cavicchio and Alex Brunetti

[Event "WCCC 2006"]
[Site "Turin, Italy"]
[Date "2006.05.27"]
[Round "4"]
[White "Delfi"]
[Black "Ikarus"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
 
1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.d3 Bc5 6.O-O d6 7.Bg5 b5 8.Bb3 h6
9.Bxf6 Qxf6 10.Nc3 O-O 11.a4 Bg4 12.Nd5 Qd8 13.c3 Na5 14.Bc2 c6 15.Ne3 Bxe3 
16.fxe3 Qb6 17.Qd2 c5 18.Bd1 Bxf3 19.Rxf3 b4 20.c4 Qd8 21.Qf2 Ra7 22.Rg3 Kh8 
23.Bh5 Qe8 24.Rf3 Qd7 25.Qc2 Nc6 26.Raf1 f6 27.Qd1 Rb7 28.b3 Rc7 29.Rg3 Qe6 
30.Bg6 Ne7 31.Qh5 Qg8 32.Rff3 Nxg6 33.Rxg6 Rff7 34.Rg4 Rcd7 35.Qf5 Rde7 36.Rh3
Qf8 37.Rgh4 Rc7 38.Rh5 Rce7 39.Kh1 Qg8 40.R5h4 Qf8 41.Rg3 Qe8 42.Rh5 Rb7 43.Kg1
Rfe7 44.Rgh3 Rbc7 45.R5h4 Rb7 46.Kh1 Ra7 47.Rh5 Rad7 48.R3h4 Rb7 49.Kg1 Kg8 
50.Rh3 Rbd7 51.Rg3 Kh8 52.Rh4 Qf7 53.Kh1 Qe8 54.Rf3 Rf7 55.Kg1 Rfe7 56.Kf1 Qf7 
57.Rfh3 Qe8 58.Rh5 Rc7 59.Kg1 Rcd7 60.Kh1 Rb7 61.Rf3 Qf7 62.Rh4 Rbd7 63.Rfh3 
Qe8 64.Rg3 Qf8 65.Rh5 Qf7 66.Rhh3 Qe8 67.Kg1 Qf7 68.Rf3 Re8 69.Rh4 Ree7 70.Rfh3
Qe8 71.Rh5 Rc7 72.Rf3 Rc8 73.Kh1 Rd8 74.Rfh3 Rdd7 75.R3h4 Rb7 76.Kg1 Kg8 77.Rh3 
Rbd7 78.Rg3 Kh8 79.Rh4 Qf7 80.Rf3 Qe8 81.Rg4 Re6 82.Rh3 Ree7 83.Kh1 1/2-1/2

IsiChess

WCCC 2006, round 6, IsiChess - Delfi ^[9], Gerd Isenberg and Alex Brunetti operating Delfi

[Event "WCCC 2006"]
[Site "Turin, Italy"]
[Date "2006.05.29"]
[Round "6"]
[White "IsiChess"]
[Black "Delfi"]
[Result "0-1"]
 
1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 d5 4.Nc3 Be7 5.Bg5 h6 6.Bh4 O-O 7.e3 b6 8.cxd5 exd5 
9.Bd3 Bb7 10.O-O Nbd7 11.Rc1 Ne4 12.Bxe7 Qxe7 13.Nxe4 dxe4 14.Rxc7 Bc8 15.Bb5
Qd8 16.Rxc8 Rxc8 17.Nd2 Nf6 18.Qa4 Rc7 19.Nc4 Qd5 20.Ne5 Rfc8 21.Ba6 Re8 22.Be2 
Rb8 23.f3 b5 24.Qa3 Rb6 25.Re1 exf3 26.Bxf3 Qd6 27.Qd3 Qb4 28.Re2 Rd6 29.Qf5 a6 
30.Qb1 Nd7 31.Nd3 Qc4 32.b3 Qc3 33.b4 Rc4 34.g3 Nf6 35.Kg2 Nd5 36.Bxd5 Rxd5 
37.Qd1 Rd6 38.h3 Rc7 39.Kh2 Re6 40.Kg1 Rce7 41.Kf2 Qc6 42.Qe1 Rd6 43.Nc5 Qd5 
44.Nb3 Rf6+ 45.Kg1 Qf3 46.Nd2 Qf5 47.Kg2 Qd5+ 48.Kg1 Rc6 49.Nb3 Qf3 50.Nd2
Qh5 51.Kg2 Rc2 52.e4 Rxa2 53.Qf2 Ra4 54.d5 Rxb4 55.d6 Re8 56.Nf3 Rc4 57.e5 Qf5 
58.Rd2 Rc3 59.Qe2 Qd7 60.Kh2 a5 61.Ne1 b4 62.Nd3 b3 63.Nf4 a4 64.Nd5 Rc1 65.Qe3
Qb5 66.Ne7+ Kh8 67.d7 Rd8 68.e6 b2 69.Ng6+ Kh7 70.exf7 Rh1+ 71.Kxh1 b1=Q+ 72.Kh2
Qxg6 73.Qe8 Qf6 74.Qg8+ Rxg8 75.fxg8=Q+ Kxg8 76.d8=Q+ Qxd8 77.Rxd8+ Kf7 0-1

Forum Posts

2001 ...

Stalemate trap(SOS-Delfi) by George Lyapko, Winboard Forum, December 18, 2001 » Stalemate, Test-Positions, SOS
Delfi won the Italian-ch !! by Frank Quisinsky, CCC, June 02, 2002 » CIPS 2002
Delfi won C.I.P.S 2003, Updates in tournament calendar! by Frank Quisinsky, CCC, June 26, 2002 » CIPS 2003
I Recomend Delfi for any player in the 1800-2000 uscf range! by George Jones, CCC, September 11, 2003

2005 ...

Delfi as UCI by Gabor Szots, CCC, March 02, 2006
CCRL 40/4: Delfi 5.1 is 50 points above Delfi 5.0 by Kirill Kryukov, CCC, April 12, 2007
Delfi 5.2 : 2552 by Patrick Buchmann, CCC, October 01, 2007
Delfi, Multiprocessor support by Tony Thomas, CCC, June 24, 2008
Delfi 5.3B released - memory bug fixed by terminator, CCC, June 25, 2008
Delfi 5.3 : 2544 by Patrick Buchmann, CCC, June 25, 2008
Delfi 5.3b : 2553 by Patrick Buchmann, CCC, July 03, 2008
Delfi 5.4, Counter 0.9, Lime 66, Sissa 0.04 in the UEL by Patrick Buchmann, CCC, August 01, 2008
Pocket Delfi Trainer by Ted Summers, CCC, August 13, 2008

External Links

Chess Engine

Misc

References

What links here?

Page	Date Edited
Alex Brunetti	Jun 1, 2014
Bestia	Jan 5, 2013
CCC 2005	Feb 27, 2014
CCC 2008	Jan 6, 2014
CIPS 2002	Feb 9, 2013
CIPS 2003	Jan 6, 2014
CIPS 2004	Jan 6, 2014
CIPS 2005	Feb 4, 2013
CIPS 2006	Jan 6, 2014
CIPS 2007	Jan 6, 2014
CyberPagno	Oct 5, 2016
Delfi	Jan 7, 2016
Eigenmann Endgame Test	Jun 1, 2017
Engines	Mar 10, 2018
Fabio Cavicchio	Jan 7, 2016
George Lyapko	Jan 14, 2013
Hamsters	Apr 11, 2014
IGWT 2013	Jun 23, 2014
IGWT 2014	Feb 2, 2016
IGWT III	May 15, 2017
IGWT IV	May 17, 2017
Italian Computer Chess Championship	Sep 24, 2017
Kiwi	Sep 2, 2016
Leila	May 8, 2017
Point Value by Regression Analysis	Aug 26, 2017
Pro Deo	Apr 5, 2017
Smash	May 11, 2016
SOS	Apr 5, 2017
Spike	Jan 7, 2016
Stalemate	Feb 21, 2018
Test-Positions	Feb 25, 2018
Timo Haupt	Jan 8, 2016
WCCC 2006	Jan 28, 2018

Up one Level

Dorpsgek

GerdIsenberg — Mon, 02 Apr 2018 16:43:05 GMT

Home * Engines * Dorpsgek

		Dorpsgek, a Chess Engine Communication Protocol compliant open source chess engine by Matthew R. Brades, licensed under the GNU General Public License, written in C. Dorpsgek versions are named after Cocktails in alphabetic order, starting with Ambrosia released in July 2016 ^[1] .
Vincent van Gogh ^[2] ^[3]

Features

Board Representation

Search

Evaluation

Tapered Eval
Material
Bishop Pair
Piece-Square Tables
Mobility for Bishop and Knight
Rook on Open File
King Safety
Pawn Structure
Doubled Pawn
Isolated Pawn
Passed Pawn
- Rule of the Square
Tempo

Forum Posts

Debugging crashes in the wild by Matthew R. Brades, CCC, June 28, 2016
Dorpsgek Ambrosia by Matthew R. Brades, CCC, July 07, 2016
Dorpsgek Bloody Mary by Matthew R. Brades, CCC, September 04, 2016
Dorpsgek Cosmopolitan by Matthew R. Brades, CCC, January 14, 2017
Dorpsgek Dillinger by Matthew R. Brades, CCC, June 08, 2017
Dorpsgek Eve's Temptation by Matthew R. Brades, CCC, April 02, 2018

External Links

Chess Engine

Misc

dorpsgek - Wiktionary
village idiot - Wiktionary
Dorpsgek from Wikipedia.nl (Dutch)
Village idiot from Wikipedia
De dorpsgek van Schoonvergeten - Wikipedia.nl (Dutch) Comic by Didier Comès (Silence in French) ^[4]

Cocktails

References

^ Dorpsgek Ambrosia by Matthew R. Brades, CCC, July 07, 2016
^ Vincent van Gogh: Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat, 1887, oil on cardboard, Rijksmuseum, Wikimedia Commons
^ Van dorpsgek naar cultfiguur by Merel Lucassen, October 05, 2015 (Dutch)
^ Stripspeciaalzaak.be - BelgenTop 50 nr. 8: De Dorpsgek van Schoonvergeten

What links here?

Page	Date Edited
Dorpsgek	Apr 2, 2018
Engine releases	Apr 23, 2018
Engines	Mar 10, 2018
Jester	Sep 15, 2017
Matthew R. Brades	Jun 9, 2017
Piece-Sets	Jun 9, 2017

Up one Level

Enigma

GerdIsenberg — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 20:35:38 GMT

Home * Engines * Enigma

		Enigma, a Chess Engine Communication Protocol compatible chess engine by Kamil Przybyła, written in C and first released in November 2003 ^[1]. Enigma is a quite selective searcher with the aim to reduce the effective branching factor, and focuses on pawn structure, specially passed pawns, and has some speculative king attack code. Enigma participated at the PCCC 2003.
Enigma Machine ^[2]

Selected Games

PCCC 2003, Enigma - Matacz ^[3]

[Event "2nd PCCC 2003"]
[Site "Lodz"]
[Date "2003.08.??"]
[Round "?"]
[White "Enigma"]
[Black "Matacz"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
 
1.Nc3 c5 2.e4 Nc6 3.Bb5 e5 4.Bxc6 dxc6 5.d3 Bd6 6.f3 Nf6 7.Kf2 b5 8.Be3 O-O 
9.Nge2 b4 10.Nb1 Be6 11.c4 Be7 12.Qb3 a5 13.Nd2 a4 14.Qc2 Qd7 15.Ng3 Rfd8 
16.Ke2 a3 17.b3 Ra7 18.h4 Qd6 19.Rhd1 Rad7 20.Ndf1 Ng4 21.h5 Nxe3 22.Nxe3 g6 
23.Kf1 Qd4 24.Qe2 Bh4 25.Nh1 gxh5 26.Nf2 Qb2 27.Nc2 Bxf2 28.Kxf2 f5 29.Qd2 
Kf7 30.Qe2 fxe4 31.dxe4 Rxd1 32.Rxd1 Rxd1 33.Qxd1 Qxa2 34.f4 Bg4 35.Qd3 exf4 
36.e5 Kg7 37.Kg1 Qb1+ 38.Kh2 a2 39.Qd8 Qxc2 40.Qe7+ Kg8 41.Qe8+ Kg7 42.Qe7+ 
Kg8 1/2-1/2

Forum Posts

2003

Another Polish xboard/winboard Engine by Grzegorz Sidorowicz, Winboard Forum, November 05, 2003
Enigma 1.0.1 released! by Kamil Przybyła, Winboard Forum, November 05, 2003
Enigma 1.0.2 released! by Kamil Przybyła, Winboard Forum, November 06, 2003
Enigma 1.0.3 released! by Kamil Przybyła, Winboard Forum, November 08, 2003
Enigma 1.0.5 released! by Kamil Przybyła, Winboard Forum, November 09, 2003
Enigma 1.0.6 released! by Kamil Przybyła, Winboard Forum, November 10, 2003
Enigma 1.0.7 released :) by Kamil Przybyła, Winboard Forum, November 10, 2003
Enigma 1.0.8 released! by Kamil Przybyła, Winboard Forum, November 13, 2003
Enigma 1.0.9 released! by Kamil Przybyła, Winboard Forum, November 14, 2003
Enigma 1.0.10 released! by Kamil Przybyła, Winboard Forum, November 14, 2003
Enigma 1.1.1 released! by Kamil Przybyła, Winboard Forum, December 05, 2003

2004

Enigma 1.1.2 released! by Kamil Przybyła, Winboard Forum, January 03, 2004
Enigma 1.1.3 released! by Kamil Przybyła, Winboard Forum, January 17, 2004
Enigma 1.1.4 released! by Kamil Przybyła, Winboard Forum, June 02, 2004

External Links

Chess Engine

Index of /chess/engines/Norbert's collection/Enigma 1.1.4 by Norbert Raimund Leisner, hosted by Kirill Kryukov
Enigma from WBEC Ridderkerk
Enigma 1.1.4 in CCRL 40/4

Misc

References

^ Enigma changelog.txt
^ Enigma Machine at the Imperial War Museum, London, Photo by Karsten Sperling, December 31, 2004, Enigma machine from Wikipedia
^ Mistrzostwa Polski Programów Szachowych - PGN
^ Marian Rejewski (1981). How Polish Mathematicians Deciphered the Enigma. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, pdf

What links here?

Page	Date Edited
Engines	Mar 10, 2018
Enigma	Feb 9, 2015
Kamil Przybyła	Apr 16, 2014
PCCC 2003	Mar 13, 2013

Up one Level

EtaBeta

GerdIsenberg — Thu, 07 Jan 2016 18:41:47 GMT

Home * Engines * EtaBeta

		EtaBeta, a chess engine by Antonia Jeanrenaud, competing the WCCC 2006 in Turin. EtaBeta, written in Visual Basic, is not a conventional alpha-beta searcher, but uses an own approach to analyse and select a move. Alessandro Scotti on EtaBeta: "This program is the most original I know of, and the only one with the evaluation of a move as written comment on why the move is good or not. Unfortunately, the search of Etabeta is too shallow compared to more traditional algorithms, and often remains victim of combinations it realizes too late" ^[1] .
Eta Beta ^[2]

Forum Posts

Re: Looking for a Random Mover by Stephan Vermeire, Winboard Forum, January 15, 2010

External Links

References

^ Computer Chess Cup 2005 by Alessandro Scotti
^ "Eta Beta", original "Eega Beeva" is owned by The Walt Disney Company. © & ™ DISNEY. The display of Disney characters for non-profit purposes has so far been allowed by The Walt Disney Company as long as proper credit is given, from Mickey Mouse universe - Eega Beeva from Wikipedia

What links here?

Page	Date Edited
Antonia Jeanrenaud	Jan 7, 2016
CCC 2005	Feb 27, 2014
CIPS 2004	Jan 6, 2014
CIPS 2005	Feb 4, 2013
Engines	Mar 10, 2018
EtaBeta	Jan 7, 2016
WCCC 2006	Jan 28, 2018

Up one Level

Excelsior

GerdIsenberg — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 11:31:41 GMT

Home * Engines * Excelsior

		Excelsior, a WinBoard compliant chess engine by Marek Kłonowski, initially written in Delphi, and since version 3.16 rewritten in C# ^[1], which requires the Windows .Net framework. Excelsior (Delphi) played the PCCC 2003, released to the public in November 2004 ^[2], the C# version played the IOPCCC 2007.
Longfellow Excelsior ^[3]

Selected Games

IOPCCC 2007, round 3, Excelsior - Atak

[Event "IOPCCC 2007"]
[Site "Lodz POL"]
[Date "2007.06.29"]
[Round "3"]
[White "Excelsior"]
[Black "Atak"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
 
1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 c6 4.e3 Bd6 5.Bd3 f5 6.O-O Nf6 7.b3 Qe7 8.a4 a5 
9.c5 Bc7 10.Nc3 Bd7 11.Ba3 O-O 12.Qc1 Na6 13.Bxa6 Rxa6 14.b4 axb4 15.Bxb4 
e5 16.dxe5 Ng4 17.a5 Nxe5 18.Nxe5 Qxe5 19.f4 Qf6 20.Qd2 Rfa8 21.Ra4 Qd8 
22.Rfa1 Bxa5 23.Qb2 Bc7 24.Rxa6 Rxa6 25.Rxa6 bxa6 26.Qb3 a5 27.Ba3 Qb8 
28.Qd1 Qf8 29.Qd4 Bd8 30.Qa4 Qe8 31.Kf2 Qh5 32.Kg1 Qh4 33.Qd1 Qf6 34.Qb3 
Be7 35.g3 h6 36.Kf2 Be8 37.h3 Bd8 38.Ne2 Qe7 39.Nd4 g6 40.Qb8 Qc7 41.Qa8 
Bd7 42.Bc1 Kf8 43.h4 g5 44.fxg5 hxg5 45.hxg5 a4 46.Bd2 Qc8 47.Qxa4 Bxg5 
48.Qa7 Qd8 49.Qb7 Qe8 50.Qc7 Kg8 51.Qb7 Bf6 52.Bc1 Be7 53.Ba3 Bf8 54.Bb4 
Bh6 55.Bd2 Bg7 56.Ba5 Kf8 57.Bc7 Kf7 58.Bd6 Kg8 59.Bf4 Bf6 60.Qc7 Be7 
61.Bd6 Bg5 62.Bf4 Bd8 63.Qb8 Kf7 64.Qa7 Kg6 65.Kf1 Be7 66.Kf2 Qc8 67.Kg2 
Bf6 68.Kf2 Bg7 69.Bd6 Kh7 70.Nf3 Kg8 71.Nd4 Bh8 72.Bf4 Bf6 73.Bd6 1/2-1/2

Forum Posts

Re: Excelsior by Dann Corbit, Winboard Forum, March 12, 2004
Re: Engines written in which programming language? by Andreas Herrmann, Winboard Forum, June 02, 2009

External Links

Chess Engine

Excelsior from WBEC Ridderkerk

Misc

excelsior - Wiktionary
Excelsior from Wikipedia
List of Starfleet starships ordered by class - Excelsior class - Wikipedia
Excelsior Comics from Wikipedia
Excelsior Diamond from Wikipedia
Excelsior JET from Wikipedia
Excelsior (Longfellow) from Wikipedia
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1842) Excelsior in Ballads and Other Poems. pp. 129, 2nd edition from the Internet Archive
Excelsior (chess problem) from Wikipedia
Loyd's Excelsior! by Frederic Friedel, ChessBase Puzzles, October 26, 2013 ^[4]
Chess Problems: Excelsior Again, ChessBase News, December 05, 2013

References

^ Re: Engines written in which programming language? by Andreas Herrmann, Winboard Forum, June 02, 2009
^ Excelsior from WBEC Ridderkerk
^ Excelsior 1846 illustration, reprinted in Charles C. Calhoun (2005). Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life. Beacon Press
^ Original Excelsior problem by Frederic Friedel, CCC, December 11, 2000

What links here?

Page	Date Edited
Engines	Mar 10, 2018
Excelsior	Apr 16, 2014
IOPCCC 2007	Nov 19, 2016
Marek Kłonowski	Apr 16, 2014
PCCC 2003	Mar 13, 2013

Up one Level

Firefly

GerdIsenberg — Mon, 23 Oct 2017 14:28:22 GMT

Home * Engines * FireFly

		FireFly, an UCI compliant chess engine by Andrew Fan, first released in May 2004. FireFly is written in C, apparently uses an own 32-bit implementation of single line Magic Bitboards aka Kindergarten Bitboards ^[1], is able to probe Nalimov Tablebases, and performs a parallel search, version 2.6 playing the TCEC Season 5.
Lampyris noctiluca ^[2]

Selected Games

TCEC Season 5, round 5, FireFly - Crafty ^[3]

[Event "TCEC Season 5 - Stage 1"]
[Site "http://tcec.chessdom.com"]
[Date "2013.09.08"]
[Round "5.15"]
[White "Firefly 2.6"]
[Black "Crafty 23.6"]
[Result "0-1"]
 
1.Nf3 f5 2.g3 g6 3.Bg2 Bg7 4.d4 Nf6 5.O-O O-O 6.b3 Ne4 7.Bb2 c5 8.c4 Nc6
9.Nc3 Nxd4 10.Nxd4 Bxd4 11.Nxe4 Bxb2 12.Rb1 Bg7 13.Nxc5 Qc7 14.b4 f4 15.Qd3 
a5 16.a3 Kh8 17.Qe4 axb4 18.axb4 fxg3 19.hxg3 e6 20.Rfd1 Ra3 21.Rb3 Rxb3 
22.Nxb3 b6 23.Qd3 Qa7 24.b5 Qa3 25.Nd4 Qb4 26.Rd2 Bf6 27.e4 Kg7 28.Nf3 h5 
29.e5 Be7 30.Nd4 h4 31.gxh4 Rf4 32.Re2 Bxh4 33.Bf3 g5 34.Bh5 Kh8 35.f3 Qe7 
36.Re3 Qh7 37.Qxh7+ Kxh7 38.Rd3 Kh6 39.Bg4 Be1 40.Nc2 Ba5 41.Ne3 Bb4 42.Kf2 
Kg7 43.Ke2 Kg6 44.Kf2 Kf7 45.Bh5+ Ke7 46.Rd1 Bc3 47.Rg1 Bxe5 48.Rxg5 Bd4 
49.Bg6 Bb7 50.Rg3 e5 51.Bh5 Kd6 52.Ke2 Bxe3 53.Kxe3 Rxc4 54.Rg7 Rc3+ 55.Kf2 
Rb3 56.Bg4 Bc8 57.Rg8 Kc7 58.Rg7 Rxb5 59.Bh3 Rc5 60.Rf7 b5 61.f4 b4 62.fxe5 
b3 63.Rf3 Rc2+ 64.Kg3 b2 65.Rb3 Bb7 66.Bf5 Rg2+ 67.Kh3 Bd5 68.Rb5 Rf2 69.Bb1 
Kc6 70.Rb8 Rg2 71.Bd3 Rd2 72.Bh7 Kc5 73.Kg3 Kd4 74.Kf4 Rf2+ 75.Kg4 Kxe5 
76.Bb1 Rg2+ 77.Kh3 Kd4 78.Rb5 Rd2 79.Kg3 Kc3 80.Rc5+ Bc4 81.Ba2 d5 82.Bb1 
0-1

Forum Posts

2004

New chess engine - FireFly 1.0.0 by Andrew Fan, Winboard Forum, May 18, 2004
KKFChess 2.6.3 and FireFly 1.0.2 released by Andrew Fan, Winboard Forum, May 30, 2004

2005 ...

FireFly 1.5 is 10MB? by Juan Pablo Naar C., CCC, January 08, 2006
FireFly 2.2.2 : 1971 by Patrick Buchmann, CCC, May 14, 2007
FireFly 2.3.1 : 1960 by Patrick Buchmann, CCC, October 22, 2007
FireFly 2.4.1 : 1963 by Patrick Buchmann, CCC, January 06, 2008
FireFly 2.5.0 : 2065 by Patrick Buchmann, CCC, March 02, 2008
FireFly 2.5.2 : 2007 by Patrick Buchmann, CCC, June 15, 2008
FireFly 2.5.4 : 2009 by Patrick Buchmann, CCC, January 03, 2009
FireFly 2.5.6 : 1996 by Patrick Buchmann, CCC, May 04, 2009

2010 ...

FireFly 2.7.0 by Graham Banks, CCC, January 24, 2014
New Firefly was released! by Günther Simon, CCC, October 23, 2017

External Links

Chess Engine

Misc

References

^ 32-bit Magic experiments by Andrew Fan, Winboard Forum, December 03, 2009
^ Lampyris noctiluca, female, June 2005, Germany, Bioluminescence from Wikipedia
^ TCEC - Archive Mode - Season 5 - Stage 1 - Round 5.15

What links here?

Page	Date Edited
Andrew Fan	Jul 30, 2017
Dirty	Nov 14, 2017
Eigenmann Endgame Test	Jun 1, 2017
Engine releases	Apr 23, 2018
Engines	Mar 10, 2018
Fire	Oct 12, 2017
Firefly	Oct 23, 2017
IGWT III	May 15, 2017
Kindergarten Bitboards	Aug 1, 2017
TCEC Season 5	Jun 2, 2014
TCEC Season 9	Nov 6, 2017

Up one Level

Freccia

GerdIsenberg — Tue, 26 Dec 2017 10:51:58 GMT

Home * Engines * Freccia

		Freccia, a chess engine by Stefano Gemma with a command line interface, a complete rewrite of Raffaela in x86 assembly using some 64 bit features ^[1] (MMX). Its piece coding allows move generation with one x86 test instruction per target square and sliding piece direction, branching on different processor flags - either jump if greater to next direction in case of invalid square outside the board or own piece obstruction, and to push the move to a list otherwise without affecting flags, to post-branch if positive after a capture was generated, or to continue with the next square of the same direction after a quiet move otherwise ^[2]. Freccia played the CCC 2009, the IOCSC 2010, and the IOCSC 2011.
Green and Red Arrow ^[3]

Forum Posts

Perft and mate by Stefano Gemma, CCC, August 16, 2009 » Perft
Assembly move generation in Freccia by Stefano Gemma, CCC, July 26, 2011
Freccia 0.0.2.5 released by Stefano Gemma, CCC, April 21, 2017
Christmas gift by Stefano Gemma, December 25, 2017

External Links

Chess Engine

Chess software for free - Original software made in Italy by Stefano Gemma

Misc

Freccia from Wikipedia
freccia - Wiktionary
Freccia - Wikipedia.it (Italian)
Freccia Verde - Wikipedia.it (Italian)
Green Arrow from Wikipedia

References

^ Freccia 0.0.2.5 released by Stefano Gemma, CCC, April 21, 2017
^ Assembly move generation in Freccia by Stefano Gemma, CCC, July 26, 2011
^ Green Arrow and Red Arrow, Comic Con 2008, Image by Clarence Risher, August 30, 2008, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons

What links here?

Page	Date Edited
CCC 2009	Apr 29, 2015
Drago	Apr 22, 2017
Engines	Mar 10, 2018
Freccia	Dec 26, 2017
IOCSC 2010	Jul 13, 2013
IOCSC 2011	Feb 26, 2013
Perft	Sep 26, 2017
Raffaela	Apr 22, 2017
Stefano Gemma	Dec 26, 2017

Up one level

Gargamella

GerdIsenberg — Fri, 16 Aug 2013 17:22:37 GMT

Home * Engines * Gargamella

		Gargamella a WinBoard compliant chess engine written by Nicola Rizzuti, first released in December 2001 ^[1]. Gargamella played the CIPS 2002 Campionato Italiano per Programmi Scacchistici with 3/6.
Gargamel and his cat Azrael ^[2]

Etymology

The programs name was inspired by Gargamella, Italian for Gargamel ^[3], the Evil Wizard is the sworn enemy of the Smurfs from the Belgian comic and television franchise centered on a group of small blue fictional creatures, created and first introduced as a series of comic characters by the Belgian comics artist Peyo in 1958 ^[4], published by Dupuis. Further, Gargamella is a genus of sea slugs, dorid nudibranchs, shell-less marine gastropod molluscs in the family Discodorididae ^[5].

Quotes

Nicola Rizzuti about his progam ^[6]:

"... many features are implemented but not activated for stability problems. I think it is better to release it than to make it get rusty on my pc and I hope that this first release will give me more speed in developing. Currently Gargamella has a small opening book, just to vary its play and to avoid moves such as 1. a4...

Photos & Games

^[7]

Esc

CIPS 2002, round 2, Nicola Rizzuti and Claudio della Corte, Gargamella - Esc ^[8]

[Event "CIPS 2002"]
[Site "Pontedera"]
[Date "2002.06.01"]
[Round "2"]
[White "Gargamella 0.6"]
[Black "Esc 1.16"]
[Result "0-1"]
 
1.e4 c6 2.d4 d5 3.exd5 cxd5 4.Nc3 Nf6 5.Bb5+ Bd7 6.Nge2 Bxb5 7.Nxb5
Qa5+ 8.Nbc3 e6 9.Bg5 Ne4 10.Bd2 Nxc3 11.Bxc3 Qb6 12.a4 Bd6 13.Ng3 O-O
14.O-O Qc7 15.Qd3 Rc8 16.Rae1 Qc4 17.Qxc4 Rxc4 18.Ra1 Bxg3 19.fxg3
Nc6 20.Rad1 Rxa4 21.Rf2 Ra2 22.g4 b5 23.b4 a5 24.bxa5 b4 25.Be1 R8xa5
26.g5 R5a3 27.Kf1 Rb2 28.g4 Raa2 29.Rdd2 Na5 30.Rde2 Nc4 31.Rf3 Na3
32.Ref2 Nxc2 33.Rxf7 Ne3+ 34.Kg1 Rxf2 35.Rxf2 Rxf2 36.Kxf2 b3 37.Kxe3
b2 38.h4 b1=Q 39.Bf2 e5 40.dxe5 Qe4+ 41.Kd2 d4 42.e6 Qf4+ 43.Ke2
Qxg4+ 44.Kd2 Qf4+ 45.Ke1 d3 46.Bd4 Qc1+ 47.Kf2 d2 48.e7 Qe1+ 49.Kg2
d1=Q 50.e8=Q+ Qxe8 51.Kg3 Qee2 52.Bc5 Qf3+ 53.Kh2 Qdh1# 0-1

Golem

CIPS 2002, round 2, Golem - Gargamella

[Event "CIPS 2002"]
[Site "Pontedera"]
[Date "2002.06.02"]
[Round "5"]
[White "Golem 0.4"]
[Black "Gargamella 0.6"]
[Result "0-1"]
 
1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 Bc5 4.c3 Nf6 5.d4 exd4 6.e5 Qe7 7.Bxc6 dxc6
8.O-O Nd5 9.cxd4 Bb6 10.Bg5 f6 11.exf6 gxf6 12.Bh6 Be6 13.Re1 O-O-O
14.Nbd2 Rhe8 15.Nc4 Qf7 16.Bd2 Rg8 17.Rc1 Bg4 18.Qb3 Qh5 19.Nxb6+
cxb6 20.Kh1 Bxf3 21.gxf3 Qh4 22.Re2 Qh3 23.Rg1 Rxg1+ 24.Kxg1 Rg8+ 
25.Bg5 Rxg5+ 26.Kh1 Qg2# 0-1

Forum Posts

a new Italian program "Gargamella" by Gianluigi Masciulli, Winboard Forum, December 18, 2001

External Links

Chess Engine

Gargamella from WBEC Ridderkerk
Gargamella 0.5.0 in CCRL 40/4

Misc

References

What links here?

Page	Date Edited
CIPS 2002	Feb 9, 2013
Engines	Mar 10, 2018
ESC	Aug 14, 2013
Gargamella	Aug 16, 2013
Nicola Rizzuti	Feb 2, 2016

Up one Level

Gromit

GerdIsenberg — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 19:55:11 GMT

Home * Engines * GromitChess

		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.

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

References

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

What links here?

Page	Date Edited
Anaconda	Jul 4, 2015
ChessBase	Nov 25, 2017
Edwards' Tablebases	Sep 26, 2016
Engines	Mar 10, 2018
Frank Schneider	Jan 7, 2016
Gromit	Apr 5, 2017
IPCCC 1997	Aug 24, 2013
IPCCC 1999	Dec 21, 2012
IPCCC 2000	Dec 21, 2012
IPCCC 2001	Jan 9, 2014
IPCCC 2002	May 31, 2014
Kai Skibbe	Jan 7, 2016
PocketGrandmaster	Sep 17, 2015
Rabbit	Oct 5, 2014
The Crazy Bishop	Jan 7, 2016
WCCC 1999	Jul 13, 2017
WMCCC 1995	Jan 3, 2018
WMCCC 2001	Jul 25, 2017

Up one level

Wikispaces : chessprogramming - items matching description

Abyss

Table of Contents

Description

Move Generation

Search

Basics

Move Ordering

Selectivity

Evaluation

Misc

Abyss' ICGA Tournaments

See also

Publications

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Engine

Misc

References

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Table of Contents

See also

Forum Posts

External Links

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Misc

References

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Table of Contents

Features

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Chess Engine

Misc

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Asterisk

Table of Contents

Etymology

Photos & Games

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Chess Engine

Misc

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Table of Contents

Photos & Games

See also

Forum Posts

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Beast

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Selected Games

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Chess Program

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Brutus

Table of Contents

How it started

Etymology

Description

FPGA Search

Evaluation

Move Generation

Distributed Search

Tournament Play