2018 Chess Program Descriptions

Below you’ll find the descriptions of the programs participating in the different Computer Chess Events. Please send the organisation an updated description if necessary (think about article 2) or if there is currently no description and the HIARCS or GridGinkgo descriptions are nice examples. The current descriptions have been taken from the entry form you sent!

During the tournaments this information will be extended with the hardware used, opening books and end game tables.

HIARCS

  • Author: Mark Uniacke
  • Description:

    HIARCS is a past winner of the World Computer Chess Championship and World Chess Software Championships and one of the few original PC chess programs still competing in top level chess competition.

    HIARCS has been in development for over thirty years and since 1991 when it won its first World title it has always been among the top chess programs in the world. In this time it has led rating lists and won World Championship titles. It was the first PC chess program to defeat a FIDE International Master in a match and has been a favourite of a number of World Chess Champions including the ex World Champion Vishwanathan Anand. Garry Kasparov who used HIARCS to prepare said towards the end of his match with Deep Blue2 that “HIARCS is much better positionally than Deep Blue”.

    HIARCS is available from http://www.hiarcs.com on a number of platforms including PC Windows, Apple Mac and iPhone/iPad handheld devices. The handheld versions have won multiple matches against GMs and have even won three GM/IM tournaments in the Philippines and Argentina. The last time it competed on a handheld device in the Mercosur Cup in Argentina 2009 it achieved a 9.5/10 score with a 2938 Elo performance rating. In 2012 the new HIARCS Chess Explorer graphical user interface for PC Windows and Apple Mac established itself as a World class chess interface for players of all abilities.

    HIARCS’ playing style is now very aggressive with a distinctive liking for attacking the opponent’s king and risk taking. This often leads to dynamic exciting games which are often played on a knife-edge. HIARCS takes advantage of multi-processors/cores to improve its chess performance. A very strong tournament opening book with latest theory is used together with up to 6 man Nalimov and Syzygy endgame tablebases.

    We thank Eugene Nalimov and Andrew Kadatch for their kind permission to use their access code (copyright (c) Eugene Nalimov) and decompression code (copyright (c) Andrew Kadatch) for Nalimov tablebases in HIARCS chess engines. We also thank Ronald de Man for his Syzygy Bases which are accessed by HIARCS.

Shredder

  • Author: Stefan Meyer-Kahlen

Description:

Chiron

  • Author: Ubaldo Andrea Farina
  • Description:

Chiron is a classical Alpha-Beta searcher whose development started in the fall of 2002. Chiron supports both the UCI and the Winboard communication protocols and it can read Polyglot and CTG opening books. Magic Bitboards are used for move generation and board representation. The search implements most of the well known search techiniques/heuristics and it can detect static and dynamic pawn blockages. The parallel search is based on the LazySMP approach since Chiron 3 while former versions used the Young Brothers Wait Concept. Logistic Regression is used to tune the evaluation function. Chiron has its own bitbases for 3 and 4 pieces (plus one for KPPKP) and it can probe Syzygy, Gaviota, Nalimov and Scorpio bitbases/tablebases using the code provided by their authors. Chiron has played in many Italian and on-line tournaments and in two World Championships. It has won 4 Italian Championships and the CCT14 in 2012. In 2014 it was chosen by Ubisoft as the engine for the chess mini-game in Watchdogs.

Komodo

  • Author: Don Dailey, Mark Lefler and Larry Kaufman
  • Description:

    Komodo heavily relies on evaluation rather than depth, and thus has a distinctive positional style.

Pauline

  • Author: Patrick Corey
  • Description: Written in C#. Classic mini-max with alpha-beta pruning.

Jonny

  • Author: Johannes Zwanziger
  • Description:

Booot

  • Author: Alex Morozov
  • Description: Written on Delphi (Object Pascal)

The Baron

  • Author: Richard Pijl
  • Description:

GridGinkgo

  • Author: Frank Schneider (Ginkgo – Base Engine), Robert Hyatt (Crafty time control, engine communication protocol, and data structure parts), Kai Himstedt (Optimistic Pondering Parallelization – Grid Engine Framework, supported by ideas from Timo Haupt)
  • Description:

    GridGinkgo is an enhanced version of GridChess (participating in the WCCC in 2007 and 2016) using an adopted Ginkgo (participating in the WCCC in 2015) version as base engine. GridGinkgo is composed of two major components: The proxy chess engine (Crafty based) performs no tree search itself but has some kind of a master role to control the Optimistic Pondering with distributed workers. One can imagine the workers as forming a pondering pipeline tree with expected opponent’s moves, extracting this information from the principal variations provided by Ginkgo as the base engine, which is the other major component of the system. Ginkgo uses the Syzygy EGTB probing code by Ronald de Man.

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