Author: Dan Honeycutt
Date: 17:15:18 03/13/04
I started some months ago on a chess program. I was not a total neophyte; 20 years ago I wrote a chess program and a program to play Nine Man's Morris using alpha beta search. I found much had changed in 20 years, hash tables, null moves, even the basic alpha beta search (back then i used a loop and not recursion). This began as a spare time activity. To my wife's disgust it became rather an addiction. I feel in good company here. At any rate I think the program is bug free enough to complete a game without crashing. I have no web page to upload the program to but will be happy to email a copy to anyone interested. following is the program's readme file that tells a little about it. Bruja is a windows 32 bit console application to play chess. It can be used stand-alone or with the Winboard GUI. The program would never have come to be without the contributions of others. Special thanks: First to Adrien Regimbald (Faile) and Bruce Moreland (Gerbil). From these two clearly written and well commented programs I learned the fundamentals of a chess program, how to probe a hash table, how to extract the PV, etc. etc. etc. Second to Dr. Robert Hyatt (Crafty) and Carlos del Cacho (Pepito - que no sólo me enseñó muchas cosas pero también está escrito en el idioma que me encanta). From them I learned bitboards. Bruja does legal move generation but uses the same three part (capture, non-capture and check evasion) scheme as Crafty and Pepito. Third to Ed Schröder (Rebel). Bruja uses Ed's WB and BB concept to do hanging piece and static exchange evaluation and progressive king safety evaluation. Last, but not least, to all the helpful folks at CCC who helped in ways too numerous to list. Bruja (which means witch and can mean some worse things depending on context) was started on Halloween 2003. At this writing (March 2004) it's a fairly basic program about on par with Faile and Gerbil (Crafty, Pepito and Rebel will crush it). The evaluation has only the aforementioned king safety, some pawn structure and piece location tables. It has no pondering. It has little clue how to manage time. etc. etc. Bruja is somewhat unique in that it is bilingual (English and Spanish). I hope to add more languages in the future. If you are fluent in a language other than English and Spanish, and are willing to translate about 40 phrases, I'll be sure to credit you in the source code and start-up screen. Regarding the source code, I don't plan to release it under a GPL or similar license at least until it resembles something more complete. However, there is nothing secret. If you want a copy of the source for your personal use, email me. Comments, suggestions and criticism are all welcome. Dan Honeycutt dhoneycutt@jjg.com
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