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Subject: New Chess engine released! Beta testers needed!

Author: Colin Frayn

Date: 06:13:15 05/31/01


I am proud to announce the first beta version of my new rotated
bitboard engine, Beowulf! This is a joint project in collaboration
with Dann Corbit, and is finally in a form which can be released to
the chess community.

Beowulf is currently fairly strong (3 crown level) and has a very fast
rotated bitboard movegen algorithm. It is totally open source, and its
available for anyone who wants to fiddle around with the code. It is
very heavily commented, and the plan is that this program is to be
used in conjunction with the project webpage (see below) to teach
people how to program chess code, and to teach the principles of
bitboard notation.

As I said, this is only a beta release, so there is no executable. I'm
looking for people with experience in chess programming who might be
able to play around with the code and see what they can fix. Currently
there are a lot of outstanding problems with the program, and I'm sure
that a community effort should get this program competing with the
best of them. Hopefully we'll get an alpha release out in a few weeks.

I hope you enjoy the program. It's taken a heck of a lot of bugfixing
and tweaking over the last few months. Dann's computers have barely
stopped running test suites! Apparently its first game on Dann's
computer (yesterday) was a 4.5 - 3.5 win against Amy in rapid
blitz. Not a bad start.

Thanks in advance for your help.

There's also a (suspiciously familiar) homepage with a few links,
including a detailed theory page.

URL:
http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~cmf/chess/beowulf.html
Email:
cmf29@cam.ac.uk

Cheers,
Colin & Dann

P.S. I fully expect a load of compatibility problems for the first
week or two. Bear with me - I don't use windows much myself so it's
impossible to actually test the thing under all setups. Please send in
bug reports.

P.P.S. The new (and last ever) version of ColChess has been put on
hold temporarily to get Beowulf out. I assure you it's really really
close to release. Watch this space.




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