BCE

Boo's Chess Engine

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Project maintained by cwbowron Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

BCE - Boo’s Chess Engine (aka Bowron - Abernethy Chess Engine)

Once upon a time I wrote a small chess engine in Lisp. Then I wanted that engine to go faster, so I rewrote it in C. Then a while later I wanted to do a better chess engine, with more features. I am a big fan of Lisp so I wrote it in that. Then, again I wanted it to be faster so I rewrote it in C. Then for an AI course project, I added learning to the C version. The result has evolved into what you will find in this archive. It is alternatively known as BACE (Bowron-Abernethy Chess Engine) or BCE (Boo’s Chess Engine). Rob Abernethy and I worked together to add the learning algorithm.

BCE was the basis for pspChess, an open-source chess game for the PlayStation Portable.

• Project Proposal Presentation
• Final Presentation
• Project Paper

Features

• Search
  • NegaScout search
  • Quiescence search
  • Iterative deepening
  • Null move search
  • Transposition tables
  • Aspiration Windows
  • Move ordering
  • Adjustable search depth
• Pondering
• Opening book
• icsdrone / WinBoard interface
• FEN parsing
• Temporal difference learning

Rating

BCE has played games on freechess.org under two accounts:

BACE (learning enabled)

Last disconnected: Tue Mar  4, 14:37 EST 2003

          rating     RD      win    loss    draw   total   best
Blitz      1908    350.0    6740    3215     503   10458   1995 (25-Dec-2000)
Standard   1529    350.0       1       5       0       6
Lightning  2028    350.0     423     202      15     640   2078 (19-Dec-2000)
Wild       1760    350.0       9       9       0      18

ddlchess (learning disabled)

Last disconnected: Sat Sep 22, 10:04 EST 2001

          rating     RD      win    loss    draw   total   best
Blitz      1947    350.0    6151    4913     813   11877   2054 (05-Jan-2001)
Standard   1677    350.0    1180     868      81    2129   1975 (12-Aug-2000)
Lightning  2057    350.0    2652    1648     170    4470   2179 (30-Aug-2000)
Wild       1742    350.0       6      32       0      38

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Dann Corbit for his many helpful hints, suggestions, and code.