Author: Dan Honeycutt
Date: 12:41:36 01/26/05
From posts below and some emails it seems several in this forum were not aware of Simon. A while back when Tord released Glaurung (with source code) there was a lengthy discussion in the winboard forum of the pro's and con's of open-source programs. Tord stated that future versions of Glaurung may be "swap ware" - the source would be available to open-source authors, persons like Dann Corbit with a long history of contributions to computer chess, and closed-source authors as a source code swap. I really liked Tord's idea as a means to share ideas between authors and keep the source out of the hands of those who only want to create a clone. The only downside is that it leaves beginners out in the cold. To that end I created Simon. I took my program Bruja and stripped out all the whistles and bells. In particular, the search and evaluation are very basic. I left in the fen parser, move generator, rotated bitboard stuff and all the other "nuts and bolts" needed for a program to work. I went through the code and tried to make it as clean and clear as I could (though Dann has already rung me up on a couple of cases where I could have done better). And I added extensive comments. To avoid the misunderstandings and hard feelings that have ensued with other "simple" starter programs, Simon is public domain. My feeling is that someone writing a program and using another program as a starting point wants to someday call it their own. With simon "when" you can call it your own is not an issue - it's yours from day one. The only thing I ask (in the readme file) is that you not enter it in tournaments until you make some substantial improvement. Simon is very weak and those running tournaments don't need more additions to what Olivier Deville used to call the "trash class". Dan H.
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.